Our university, program and courses provide you a rich and dynamic ecosystem of learning. This can be a source of confusion so I will try and break it down for you.

Let's start with the core toolkit:

• Portal Tool (MyNMSU) - MyNMSU is your NMSU student portal. Your email can be accessed there, registration information, grade information, payment information and more is there. We are required by NMSU policy to make sure that any important emails are sent to your NMSU email accounts which is why we ask that you make sure we have your NMSU email addresses. MyNMSU has been a bit unstable recently and I hope that is fixed soon.
• LCMS Tool (Blackboard) - Blackboard is the Learning/Content Management System (LCMS) used by NMSU. It connects to the university-wide management system known as Banner. Blackboard helps us manage student enrollment, student grades, course content, and class specific email, discussions, and chats. It provides a secure one-stop shop for your individual classes.

The LCMS tools have feature weaknesses. For example, once a class is over, it's really over and you are kicked out of the environment. Thus, we include and regularly use the following tools:

• Voice Discussion Tool (Voicethread) - Voicethread is a content presentation tool that allows for text, voice, and video discussions about the content. It is a highly populur tool with online teachers. We'll be using this to supplement WebCT's discussion tool as it lacks in voice and video to support community and presence.
• Web-Conferencing Tool (Adobe Connect) - Adobe Connect is the web-conferencing tool we prefer in the College of Extended Learning for small group and large group meetings and activities. It is the tool that we will use to provide our hybrid meetings and our synchronous class meeting. These activities are important to foster online learning community and ensure individual student success.
• Wiki Tool (Pbwiki) - Wikis are one of the most powerful online learning, collaboration, and communication tools available. As you've already noted, we use the wiki tool Pbwiki. The wiki is a place that will always be available. This relates to the weakness noted above in WebCT where when a class is over you are kicked out. You are not kicked out of the wiki unless you drop the program or your class. Our wiki hosts programmatic information, class resources and collaborations, etc. A wiki is also a great place to develop course/workshop/program content. We have plenty examples. If you are interested, send Julia an email requesting wiki examples and she'll send you some.
• Instant Messaging Tool (Skype) - We love Skype. It is the most powerful instant messaging tool as well as voice and videoconferencing tool for one-to-one or small group activities. We will use it for office hours, student-teacher meetings, and we encourage that you use it to make connections with your classmates. For example, we recommend that you add your classmates to your contacts and when you are online doing classwork that you have Skype up and running. You will start to see who is online when you are and this can be supportive of developing collaborations and supporting you as an online learner.

Next, we have our peripherals:

Of course as per the syllabus, we will be using many other tools for activities and modeling...Some of these tools include:

• Audio/Video Tools - We use Voki, YouTube, Viddler, Screencast-o-matic and more.
• Media Creation Tools - We experiment with everything of quality that we come across. Currently, you may see Animoto, Moblyng, Slideshare...
• Social Bookmarking Tools - social bookmarking allows you to share favorite links with others and preserve and organize them for yourself. We use delicious, diigo, twine...
• And more. The tools available to support online learners seem endless. There's no way to cover them all. Here's are some cool graphics that try to categorize and diagram these tools:

image retrieved August 20, 2008 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbarefoot/1814873464/

See the related blog post at http://www.fredcavazza.net/2008/06/09/social-media-landscape/