Friday, May 27, 2016

Connecting with Universities - Mentor Research Summit

I attended a Research Symposium yesterday in the Chicago area, hosted by the Illinois Mentoring Partnership. I shared some live posts on Twitter,  using the hashtag #ILmentoring. At the same time I continued my involvement with an on-line MOOC hosted by Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) by tweeting using the hashtag #CuriousCoLab.

I posted an article this morning on a new Tutor/Mentor Exchange blog that I've started on Wordpress.  This article shows that I've been reaching out to universities for many years to try to build strategic support for strategies I've piloted, that I feel will benefit the university, its students and the surrounding community.


In the article I showed how I've been trying to map participation in conferences and events. In the Tweet below, I point to a Storymap tool used by the #CuriousCoLab people to show places they had connected with in the past year.


I'd like to use the same tool to show where Tutor/Mentor Conferences have been hosted since 1994, to emphasize how I've been reaching out to universities with an invitation to incorporate the Tutor/Mentor Connection strategy.  While I could learn to do this work myself, my goal is to recruit volunteers, students, or others, who will do the work, as part of their own learning.


Below is an example of what I'm describing.  This is a PDF created by an intern from South Korea during a 7 week internship with me a few years ago. In it she's pointing to work done by a second intern to map participation growth in the Tutor/Mentor Connection Ning forum from 2007 till 2012.   Both learned new talents in doing this work and I obtained an analysis that I would not have been able to create by myself.



This is one of many projects done by interns that you can view on this page.   

Since the  people I usually connect with are busy people, with little time to investigate the ideas I'm sharing, I continue to propose that they enlist students to do the "market research" to understand what the Tutor/Mentor Connection is and what opportunities and value it might offer to a university.   I outline these steps on this wiki page.

If you're interested, let's connect.



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