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Some things facebook do, michigan can do better A good example of not getting it. Some Michigan agency, surprised and aroused by the success of social networks, thought that it would be a bright idea to replicate this for students undertaking the transition from school to university.
The state of Michigan is currently building a custom social network called the Michigan College Access Portal, at a cost of $1.5 million, to help students looking to transition from high school to college and beyond.
One point five million dollars of public funds. To build a Facebook knock-off.
This needs no further comment.
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Yeah, kind of like the French version of the internet or whatever that bright idea was…
“Michigan College Access Portal”?
Don’t you mean the “College Relationship and Access Portal”? Built by the “Society for Higher Interaction via Technology”?
For surely this was CRAP from SHIT*.
* cos Jack just left town…
LOL!
I have no direct knowledge about this, but judging from the comments at the link the MCAP may not be the waste it’s portrayed as being here. Mind you, I think there are already too many people in college….
BuddyPress.org. A social network in a box.
It’s open source. Cost: $0.
Even assuming you want to do a big deployment with a custom design and features, you’re talking a few tens of thousands of dollars at most. Including hardware.
May I suggest one more facet: and as with the Soviet Union copying the things it gleaned from the West, no state agency ever came up with an idea that was genuinely new. They can copy Facebook only AFTER they’ve seen it succeed. That doesn’t mean they understood WHY it succeeeded and that to outsmart it they’d actually have to come up with something ELSE.
There’s nothing so simple & straightforward that the heavily-unionized, stuck-in-the-80’s bureaucracy of the State of Michigan can’t hose it up entirely.
This goes 25x for anything to do with education, where the make-work nonsense is deeper than you could possibly believe. They’ve got task forces to report on the task forces that monitor their task forces, and all with stupendous benefits and mink-lined pensions.
100x if we’re talking the City of Detroit, where the very president of the Detroit Public Schools has well-known issues with basic literacy
http://www.detnews.com/article/20100304/OPINION03/3040437/1409/Does-DPS-leader-s-writing-send-wrong-message?
but the flamboyant, extravagant and endlessly-replicative programs of the school board expand unabated.
Ask me hows I knos this . . . .
llater,
llamas
I expect it’s funded by the stimulus package. Apparently America is doomed unless that $857 billion gets spent as fast as possible.