Little Great Tools Smartly Matched: NMC 2004

Small Technologies Loosely Joined is a spin-off online event at the June 2004 NMC Summer Conference. The NMC is a one-of-a-kind event, attracting an audience of highly skilled campus professionals who are very knowledgeable about and interested in the integration of emerging technologies into teaching, learning, and creative expression.

The Small Technologies Loosely Joined presentation is a complementary and fascinating participatory online event, focusing our attention on the emerging use of readily available, mostly free, discrete sets of "small" and "loosely joined" technologies - weblogs, wikis, instant messaging, audio video conferencing tools. According to the organizers of the event, Brian Lamb, Alan Levine and D'Arcy Norman "to effectively collaborate via the net does not require monolithic, expensive tool suites."

The conference goal is to engage participants in critically analyzing and reviewing how educators can deploy, connect, de-connect this new emerging breed of collaborative technologies in new, useful and interesting ways.

While doing this, the organizers are also trying to reshape the traditional format of most conference presentations, by creating an activity that will be done by the people present at the NMC conference as well as by many of the remote participants from around the world.

Educators from everywhere are invited to comment in on the blogs, to post entries on their own ones, add/edit the wikis, and to communicate via text/video chat with the organizers -- before, during, and after the presentation. If you want to see, understand, discuss, and hear both sides of the fence on these issues, put your name up there now. Recommended.