Tuesday, March 22, 2011

M-Hub Update

An open letter to the many friends of M-Hub project:  

Last week marked a couple of wonderful milestones.  It was almost exactly a year ago when we had our first after school meeting to discuss the possibility of creating a network of "experts" from within the Mercy community that our our students could tap for their project, career, and college research.

The idea flowed out of my experience in the classroom with Challenge Based Learning-- an instructional design that calls for student teams to solve real-world problems  For example, students in two of my courses are engaged in fighting teenage apathy and reducing the cost of health care.  All teams are actively engaged with the outside community.  Not only have they leveraged technology, but they also have leveraged their personal networks, consulting with judges, state troopers, professional video producers, doctors, social workers, insurance experts, etc.  M-Hub was envisioned to enhance this sort of exploration.

Thanks to terrific support from our school administration and advancement office, we made tremendous progress toward bringing our project to fruition.  Last spring, we answered some important issues about access, privacy,  and platform.  In the Fall we ran a beta test for data collection and had important meetings regarding the technical realization of our quest.  However, in order to truly integrate our site with the school's we needed technical assistance which went far beyond our abilities.  Here the administration stepped in and helped us pay for a web designer to build our site.  Today I am happy to tell you that our domain name has been registered and construction has started on . . . .


Our terrific student leadership team has an important meeting on Wednesday with Mercy's webmaster, Julie Earle. What we have accomplished in a year is pretty remarkable, and there is so much more to come.

Last Friday it was my pleasure to tell the story of M-Hub to the annual MACUL Conference at Cobo Center.  My presentation is available for your perusal at allcbl.com.

Yours truly,

Larry Baker


1 comment:

K. Koskela said...

Good job, Larry. I think this will be a great resource!

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