Dear HubICL Members,

On the administrator side of the HubICL, there is a number that I enjoy checking every day. As I am writing this, it is March 26, 2021, and the number that I see is to the right: 

Funnily enough, this number was 2937 on February 22. How did we lose so many members you may ask? Well, it was painful, but the spring cleaning—after 2-1/2 years—had to be done!

On the last page of the HubICL Hubbub, we always tell our readers how many members we have. In actuality, the number we have been reporting is the number of accounts that have been made, which is not necessarily the same as the number of members. This number included accounts for people who had forgotten their log-in and created a new account, causing them to be counted twice, and others who had started an account but had never taken the last step of confirming their e-mail. In our first two and a half years, we had collected nearly 500 unfinished or doubled accounts!

So what prompted The Great Purge? This year we are striving to build, not just a big number of accounts, but also a cohort of active users. It is difficult to know how many users are active if we do not know how many users we actually have.

We loosely define an “active user” as anyone who creates an account and then comes back another day. With the extra load of doubled and unfinished accounts, our active users only came to 36%. Freed from the excessive baggage in the denominator of our equation, on the day of The Great Purge, this number flew up to 43%.

We apologize if this causes you any difficulty in logging in in the future. For those of you who had two accounts, we kept the longtime accounts and removed the ones that seemed to have only one day of activity. If you have any difficulty getting into your account, please don’t hesitate to fill out a ticket, and we’ll be glad to get you right back into using the HubICL. Just click Help in the upper right hand corner by your profile name on each page of the HubICL.

In order to stay on top of this cleaning project, we will be doing small purges each month of unfinished accounts, and then we’ll check the doubles once a year. In this way, we will be able to give you a more accurate accounting, and we’ll know better who is “active.”

Happy Spring!

Annette Benson

Here in the HubICL Hubbub, we always make a big deal about our Digital Toolbox (with over 700 activities, assessments, and more, it’s hard not to!). But Collections and the Research Repository, two pillars of the Intercultural Learning Hub, also have excellent resources to help you meet all your intercultural learning needs. Our HubICL staff members have been working hard to deliver curated content and research in both of these spaces:

• The pandemic hasn’t stopped practitioners from building connections and promoting intercultural learning across institutional lines. Dr. Aletha Stahl, Senior Intercultural Learning Specialist at the Center for Intercultural Learning, Assessment, Mentorship and Research (CILMAR), facilitated a virtual workshop for cross-cultural leaders at Eastern Mennonite University. You can find the resources shared with the participants of that workshop in the EMU Cross-Cultural Leaders collection.
   
• Additionally, CILMAR Director Dr. Kris Acheson-Clair collaborated with Dr. Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler and Dr. Dawn Michele Whitehead to deliver a workshop on mentoring undergraduate research in global contexts at the virtual WISE Connect 2021 conference. Resources from that workshop can be found in the Mentoring UG Research in Global Contexts (MURGC) collection and three case study briefs (for VIP Global at Purdue and the Constellation and Multifaith Scholars programs at Elon) created for the workshop can be downloaded from the Research Repository.
   
• Building equitable, inclusive communities has never been more important. For curated resources on community building and social justice, check out the Ice Breaker and Community Building Activities and Assessment for Social Justice collections.
   
• In addition to her duties as CILMAR’s Intercultural Research Specialist, Dr. Lan Jin has published some of her own work in the HubICL Research Repository. In a collaborative study with Dr. Lalatendu Acharya, Jin identifies the dilemmas and coping strategies of parents of Chinese international students who are struggling with depression while they study in the United States.

Have you been collecting data or looking for a home to publish your research? The HubICL Research Repository is always accepting submissions! The Research Repository publishes a variety of documents:

• Open Access Publications: manuscripts published elsewhere, for instance in a peer-reviewed journal, and submitted in compliance with copyright agreements
   
• Faculty Publications: works in progress or work not intended for publication elsewhere
   
• Student Publications: course projects or revised conference presentations
   
• Reports/White Papers: institutional reports or research summaries for public consumption
   
• Blogs/Editorials: First person-perspectives or opinions on an intercultural issue
   
• Presentations: conference papers or presentations not published in refereed conference proceedings, workshops, key note speeches, etc. PowerPoints are also accepted.

To begin a publication, navigate to the Research Repository and click “Start publishing.” In the spirit of community and knowledge sharing, all publications in the Research Repository are open access and licensed under CC0 – Creative Commons, which means they are freely available in the public domain.

For more information on publishing on the HubICL, consult our FAQs page.

Did you know that the HubICL has a YouTube channel? Our channel includes videos on how to navigate the HubICL, as well as how to implement the variety of resources offered on the site.

Check out the four playlists currently available on the HubICL channel:

1. HubICL Toolbox How-Tos: HubICL manager Annette Benson walks users through step-by-step tutorials on how to submit a tool in the Digital Toolbox

2. HubICL Assessments: Katherine Yngve, Associate Director of Intercultural Outcomes Assessment at the Center for Intercultural Learning, Assessment, Mentorship and Research (CILMAR), introduces some intercultural assessment tools, including the following:

• Miville-Guzman Universality-Diversity Scale (M-GUDS-S)
• Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory (BEVI)
• ICEdge
• AAC&U Intercultural Knowledge and Competence VALUE Rubric
• Intercultural Effectiveness Scale (IES)
• Intercultural Attitudes, Skills, and Knowledge Short Scale PLUS – ASKS 2+
• Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI)

3. HubICL Toolbox Activities: Dr. Kris Acheson-Clair, Director of CILMAR, provides guidance for facilitators looking to implement some of the experiential activities available in the Digital Toolbox:

• Pacing
• Language Envelopes
• Pick-a-Postcard
• Albatross
• IDC Orientations Card Game
• Familiar and Unfamiliar
• Conversation Starters
• Adapt or Be Yourself
• Human Values Continuum
• Understanding Miscommunication
• Name Story aka the Name Game
• Scenery Machinery People
• Beliefs, Values and Needs Mapping Activity
• Ice Sculpture
• Mini Metaphors
• VisualsSpeak

4. Purdue InterCultural Learning Community of Practice (PICLCoP): Videos from CILMAR's series of virtual tool demonstrations geared toward intercultural learning practitioners.

Subscribe to the HubICL YouTube channel, so you don’t miss any new content!

Have you ever come across a video, or any other piece of media, and thought to yourself, “I bet there’s some way that I can use this in the classroom (or a workshop, training, etc.)!” When the Center for Intercultural Learning, Mentorship, Assessment and Research (CILMAR) staff find something that they believe might serve as good fodder for a new tool, it is published on the CILMAR Facebook page for the series "There’s Got to Be an Intercultural Learning Activity in There Somewhere Sundays," #tgtbaiclaitss. These videos and articles featured every Sunday at 10:00 AM are circulated as ideas that someone might use to create a new discussion prompt, activity, etc.

Some of the media featured recently in the series includes a video from Deaf News on how a group of Black and Indian deaf women came up with a sign for Kamala Harris; a book on words phrases in a variety of languages that describe specific feelings and cultural situations; an article on the duo Black Violin, who compose classical music with the aim of combating stereotypes about race; Norway’s reaction to the Will Ferrell General Motors Super Bowl commercial; and a video of Gurdeep Pandher Bhangra dancing to Celtic music in the Yukon.

If you’ve got an activity based on a video or article, consider submitting it to the Digital Toolbox on the HubICL!

The HubICL currently reaches over 2,500 members across 6 continents and 73 countries! Approximately 19% of members are from countries outside of the United States.

Countries with the most HubICL members include:

1. United States
2. Canada
3. Belgium
4. Japan
5. United Kingdom
6. Germany
7. Spain
8. Australia
9. Mexico
10. Colombia

The HubICL membership also spans 739 institutions of higher education, 229 private/nonprofit/government organizations, and 98 K-12 institutions.

Even after The Great Purge, the HubICL total and active* membership continues to grow! Currently, 1,071 members are actively engaging with HubICL content. 

*An active user is anyone who creates an account and returns to the site another day. 

The HubICL was created by Purdue University's Center for Intercultural Learning, Mentorship, Assessment, and Research (CILMAR)