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MLX Happenings

I am behind in citing a package of the week, but some of the freshest include: Let Excel Track Your Attendance for You!!, SCC Online Weather Station, Online Learning: What Students Should Know, and Nutrition Learning Exercise.

A few interesting things shaking out over at the Maricopa Learning eXchange. A faculty member who coordinates service learning projects at his college got the idea about using an MLX special collection to have a convenient way of organizing the reports and descriptions of the projects.

It takes about 30 seconds to set up this new special collection, and then we tagged a few existing items to include in this one. More will be coming. The flip side of this is how we helped Chris use the MLX syndication tools to build a feed from this special collection into his Service Learning projects page (that was previously manually updated).

Another one of our faculty / technology groups is wanting to get examples / descriptions of effective hybrid courses into the MLX. We might be corrallng these some time at a workshop next month.

We added a few more quick search short cuts into the front lobby of the MLX. In additon to the shortcuts for MLX items by academic subject, we have added a menu of special topics, such as MLX packages about Problem-Based Learning or WebQuests . In addition, we give you a shortcut menu to list MLX packages by Maricopa College. These just regenerate the search needed to produce the results (all search results have RSS feeds as well).

There is some cleanup inside the warehouse as we tidy up some of the database structures, but no one should notice. Still to be added are ways to have packages assigned to more than 1 special collection, and to incorporate a quick rating tool for MLX packages.