This is an online presentation for MacLearningEnvironments.org, hosted by D'Arcy Norman of the Teaching & Learning Centre, Brian Lamb of UBC, Alan Levine of the New Media Consortium, and Jim Groom of University of Mary Washington.

In 2004 three of us presented a concept of decentralized connecting web content with RSS -- "Small Technologies Loosely Joined" (http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/smallpieces), playing off of the book title by David Weinberger. Looking back at what we might call "Web 1.5", using RSS to interconnect blogs, wikis, and chat seem rather simple. At that time, flickr and del.icio.us were still truly unknown betas, Google was just a search engine, folksonomy might not even had been coined as a term, podcasting did not exist, online videos were relegated to basic downloading to view-- what a long way the web has come since then. However, underneath the shiny hood of the new tools, RSS remains a key integration factor Now we sit in 2007 with an explosion and continued expansion, of "small tools" leaving many educators overwhelmed and excited at the same time.

In this session, like a loose jazz quartet, four presenters will "jam" on the potential for teaching and learning as well as the state of web technology in four general areas

* bliki : can we genetically recombine blogs and wikis?
* mashups - bending the internet to do your bidding
* connecting people and information - RSS, Pipes, aggregators...
* insanely social software - putting the "we" in "web 2.0"

And more broadly look at the influence of open-content, connectedness, and social networking aspects.

Tune in via Elluminate. (attendees may want to log in 15 minutes prior to the event to ensure the appropriate software gets automatically installed)

Note that signing up via the Teaching & Learning Centre website is optional for this event.