M-Hub Update

My involvement with Challenge Based Learning has been pretty all-consuming these days.  But M-Hub has grabbed my attention in a big way.  This is largely due to having a remarkable student-leadership team which is bent on getting things done has helped move moved M-Hub from an interesting idea to a reality.

The basic concept of M-Hub is to provide studetns with a tool for building personal learning networks within our greater school community.  We want to build a highly searchable database of "expert" alumnae, staff, parents for students to contact for a wide variety of information.


The idea has received support from all parties, but actualizing the plan has been challenging.  Suddenly, we have major break throughs

Data Collection
We believe that Zoomerang can provide us with a polling instrument that we can send out by email or link to a web site.  If the "free version" is too limited, we think that the "pro" pay version can certainly meet our needs.  We are ready to begin building a prototype.

Web Solution
Finding a place to store our data which would allow students to gain access has been more perplexing.  However, with the help of some "seed money" from the school we will be able to secure the services of a web designer who is going to begin constructing the back end of this database.  He also is confident that the data from Zoomerang will be easy to import to the web site.  Working with Drupal our web designer will be able to integrate this feature right into the school's web site.

Fund Raising
In order to pay for the complete services of the web designer and meet other expenses such as an upgrade to Zoomerang Pro, we will need to raise funds.  Here, our status as a school club comes hand.  With 25 club members its feasible host activities.  One likely possibility is a sale of M-Hub logo flash drives.



Leveraging Technology
I'm also pleased to note that while we are not overtly a "tech club",  we are pretty clever at finding virtual tools to help us keep pushing M-Hub along.  We use "Doodle" to schedule leadership meetings.  We also carry on discussions between meetings on a private blog site created with iWeb.

MAME /MACUL
The world is about to hear about M-Hub.  Two of the student leaders and I will be presenting our project to the school library media specialists at MAME 37, this week.  I also just learned that M-Hub has been selected as a topic for the 2011 MACUL Conference at Cobo Center in March.

What a rush!

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Screen capture of M-Hub leadership private blog site

The Latest M-Hub Hubbub

For those of you who have been following the progress of M-Hub, here's an update:

* Over 20 staff, students, and administrators have attended our two general meetings.

* We have held three core leadership meetings, two platform meetings, and one club life meeting.

* We have a logo (see side panel)

* We have a mission statement (M-Hub connects the Mercy community through personal networks, furthering the learning of our students).

* We have been recognized with official "club" status at the school. We sought this in order to involve more students in the project and root ourselves more deeply in the school culture.

* Most importantly, we have made tremendous strides towards identifying a platform upon which we can build our network. After meetings with staff from our Tech Department, Advancement Office, and our web designer we are guardedly confident that the M-Hub site can be built with drupal (the same back-end system used by the White House site!) and accessible to our students with their school IDs.

We have meetings scheduled this spring to discuss formats for our data collection. We also want are working on security and user policies. At this point we are confident that we can start collecting, recruiting, and building for our ambitious project in September.

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Screen Shot from Apple Challenge Based Learning M-Hub page.