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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Mahara ePortfolios helps you to use software as you follow an experiential learning cycle. In Mahara you can:
Plan your learning.
Do what you do and gather evidence of your competence as you do those things.
View and organize your work by structuring your data in easy-to-make (web)pages and (mini-website) collections of those pages.
Reflect on your learning by use of professional journals, engaging feedback on your pages and establishing and engaging in online communities who share a similar interest.
Mahara ePortfolios: Beginner's Guide is a step-by-step guide to develop a feature-rich and highly personal electronic portfolio. Form a digital repository of reflective journals, action learning plans, presentations, reports, images and videos. Easily share this with your friends, family, tutors, students, project team and others using this step-by-step guide written in a clear and easy to learn manner.This book guides you to build an impressive e-Portfolio and to work in professional communities of interest within a Mahara walled garden. It brings to life the key features of Mahara which will help thoughtful people to display their artefacts coherently and to engage with like-minded peers professionally.This book introduces you to exciting features of Mahara framework and helps you develop a feature-rich e-portfolio for yourself. You will see how easily you can create folders, upload multiple files like project documents, pictures and videos and share them with your friends. You will learn to set up single pages and collections of pages which organize these files, making these visible only to your own chosen peers, supervisors or friends. Then, you will allow people to give their inputs.You will learn to create journals, learning plans, your professional resume, group spaces and forums which help you get connected to the rest of the world. Customization and administration of your Mahara site will be easy after you have gone through this book. Imagine how good you will feel when you will see your knowledge, success, and ideas going live and available to your chosen audiences for their inputs.Mahara ePortfolios: Beginner's Guide is a step-by-step guide to building an impressive professional e-portfolio using Mahara. It covers the key features of Mahara that will help you set up your customized digital portfolio and display the artefacts in your preferred way allowing contribution from selected users only.
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Seitenzahl: 439
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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Table of Contents
Mahara ePortfolios Beginner's Guide
Mahara ePortfolios Beginner's Guide
Copyright © 2012 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: February 2010
Second Edition: July 2012
Production Reference: 1200712
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-84951-776-8
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Jarosław Blaminsky ( <[email protected]> )
Credits
Authors
Richard Hand
Thomas W. Bell
Derrin Kent
Reviewers
Dr. Glenys Gillian Bradbury
Mary Cooch
Kristina D. C. Höppner
Heinz Krettek
Allison Miller
Pete Potter
Stacey Walker
Acquisition Editor
Kartikey Pandey
Lead Technical Editor
Pramila Balan
Technical Editor
Prasad Dalvi
Project Coordinator
Leena Purkait
Proofreader
Lydia May Morris
Indexer
Monica Ajmera Mehta
Production Coordinator
Aparna Bhagat
Cover Work
Aparna Bhagat
About the Authors
Richard Hand graduated with a first class honors degree in Computer Science from the University of Bristol in 2008 and now works full time as a frontend web developer and consultant.
Richard has worked with Mahara since joining TDM (http://tdm/info) in 2008, being responsible for management, configuration, hosting, and training. He has also developed on a range of open source software solutions including Drupal, Joomla!, and Moodle.
Thomas W. Bell has completed higher education in Environmental Sciences and he has a passion and enthusiasm for IT. Thomas is all about getting involved with the latest tools to improve the use of resources, communication with one another, and our role in developing our earth sustainably.
Thomas follows his Environmental education with a commitment to sustainability in all walks of life, both personal and business. He is actively thinking of ways to improve processes, procedures, software and so on, to improve efficiency and therefore, sustainability.
He is currently developing efficient use of technology in the apprenticeship delivery of the Wyre Academy, including use of cutting-edge tablets, signature capture, and fully implemented cutting-edge LMS solutions.
Thomas has been working with IT company TDM - which delivers e-Learning content, codeline development, training, and bespoke corporate branding - for over two years and is directly involved in the implementation and delivery of a new IT apprenticeships scheme through the TDM Wyre Academy. See http://opensourcesoftwareservices.com or http://www.wyreacademy.com.
Thomas has been regularly training groups in Mahara ePortfolios, TotaraLMS, Joomla!, and Moodle for over two years.
Derrin Kent (www.derr.in) loves personalized learning and open source software. Derrin has been working with Mahara since its version 0. He is MD of The Development Manager Ltd. (www.TDM.co).
www.TDM.co is a company who speaks six European languages fluently and who proudly runs a range of symbiotic business operations including:
Derrin is extremely proud of his wonderful Peruvian wife, Ely, and his two bilingual kids, Salvador and Micaela.
About the Reviewers
Dr. Glenys Gillian Bradbury originally graduated in Medicine from Cambridge, and is now back in the NHS working as a Clinical Teaching Fellow after an interesting and varied career pathway involving business management, educational project management, and e-Learning. In addition to teaching medical students, Glenys is also engaged in a variety of projects to embed technology in medical education. Current projects include using Mahara to embed portfolio based learning within clinical medicine and to facilitate inter-professional learning pathways, and also a multi media project called "Tomorrow's Clinicians" to support the teaching of clinical skills. She is also an LSIS e-guide and a PRINCE2 practitioner.
She was one of the authors for the earlier edition of this book, Mahara 1.2 ePortfolios: Beginner's Guide.
Mary Cooch, known online as Moodlefairy, is based at the OurLearning training centre located at Our Lady's High School, Preston Lancashire, UK. A teacher for over 25 years, Mary now spends her working days travelling Europe showing educators how best to use Moodle and Mahara. She is a regular speaker at Moodle and Mahara conferences, and is keen always to be up-to-date with the latest developments. Mary works closely with Mahara partners to help promote this excellent open source e-Portfolio, while at the same time sharing good practice in her own school with teachers and students. Mary is the author of Moodle For Teaching 7-14 Year Olds, Packt Publishing and Moodle 2 First Look, Packt Publishing. She blogs on www.moodleblog.net and can be contacted for training or consultation via OurLearning on www.ourlearning.co.uk.
Kristina D.C. Höppner is from windy Wellington in New Zealand. Kristina has been working with the Mahara Development Team at Catalyst IT, the largest independent open source technology specialist in Australasia, since June 2010. She often answers questions in the Mahara community forums and supports Mahara users. Recently, she was responsible for writing the user manuals for Mahara 1.4 and 1.5 at http://manual.mahara.org , which are now being translated by other community members.
She is also a project manager in the Catalyst IT e-Learning Team, Facilitator for Mahara and Moodle workshops, and frequent speaker at conferences and in webinars on Mahara.
Heinz Krettek is a German teacher at a school for vocational education. He has studied business sciences and sports. His main job is to prepare socioeconomically deprived students for lifelong learning. In 2006, he discovered the portfolio work and began to translate the German langpack for Mahara. The first translations for Mahara 0.6 were published on his own Moodle site. Soon after Nigel McNie installed a git repository, the actual files were published in the Mahara git. He has just finished the translation for the Mahara 1.4 release.
He has organized several education and training sessions for teachers and was a speaker at the German Moodle Moots. He publishes postings about ePortfolios and related topics at http://ewiesion.com.
He lives in the Black Forest with his wife and four kids. In his spare time, Heinz prefers the three M's — Mahara, Moodle, and marathon. He finished the New York Marathon 2000. His motto is — he who finishes a marathon will overcome all problems in school ;-)
Allison Miller has been involved in education and training for more than ten years as an Educator, Change Manager, and e-Learning Leader and Innovator.
Allison also currently leads the:
Allison's previous roles include:
Allison has a lot e-Learning and e-Assessment experience and know how, especially in the areas of:
Allison's other experiences include being the:
Pete Potter is a Teacher, e-learning Technologist, and Mahara Moodle Consultant. He has taught Computing in Manchester (UK) and in Timaru (NZ), and worked with teachers to enhance learning in the classroom with the use of technology. A passion for ePortfolios and specifically Mahara lead to him working on the Myportfolio.school.nz Project in NZ, sharing and consulting on the smart use of ePortfolios across the South Island.
Moodle also features prominently in Pete's work as he has worked with many institutions to introduce Moodle to build and establish their Managed Learning Environment. He has presented at conferences on using both Moodle and Mahara together in the classroom to engage and empower learners.
Moving back to the UK in 2012, he is now working with the UK and Ireland's leading Moodle partner, Synergy Learning. He is still working with Moodle and Mahara in the education sector, spending time with Techies and Educators ensuring they get the most from his experience. When not doing this, Pete is fell running, swimming, or cycling, and sometimes all three.
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Preface
Mahara is an ePortfolio software that allows you to quickly set up and easily manage your own rich educational or professional digital portfolio.
This book is your step-by-step guide to getting up and running with Mahara. As a new user to the Mahara platform, you will be introduced to all of the main features in detail and you can work through all of the examples at your own pace, making use of the companion Mahara site to have a go for yourself.
You will learn about all the key Mahara features that you will need to grasp in order to develop your own impressive portfolio.
Create your own content, develop a professional profile, gather your reflections in your journal, upload your work or personal files to your storage area, and make some plans.
See how you can display all of this in easy-to-create web pages — just drag-and-drop blocks of content and rearrange them, using Mahara's innovative page framework.
When you're happy with your creations, choose who you want to share them with and when. Share with users both internal and external to your Mahara site.
Finally, connect with other members in your Mahara community and collaborate in groups by participating in forums and discussions. Exchange ideas and news with your colleagues and friends.
Add to your portfolio throughout your professional career, including all of your new experiences, reflections, and progressions. When you look back, you will have a full and thorough record of your development, a great way to see how much you have grown.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, What can Mahara do for you? discusses what ePortfolios are and why Mahara is a very good choice of ePortfolio software. You will see some practical usecases for Mahara and join up to the official Mahara Community website.
Chapter 2, Getting Started with Mahara explains how to register to join the companion Mahara site for this book. You will get to grips with some of the basics of Mahara such as finding your way around and editing your profile information. You will also have your first look at the special Profile and Dashboard pages.
Chapter 3, Create and Collect Content discusses adding your own content to your portfolio. You will write in your journal, make some plans, add some notes, and upload your files. You will finish by learning how to display these on your Dashboard page.
Chapter 4, Organize and Showcase your Portfolio explains how to make a Mahara page from scratch. You will add content to your page and choose its layout and design. You will group your pages into collections. you will see how easy it is to share your pages with others.
Chapter 5, Share and Network in Groups covers connecting with other users in Mahara. You will create and participate in groups of interest. You will learn how to share files and pages in groups. You will exchange ideas in group forums.
Chapter 6, Course Groups and Other Roles in Mahara explains what a Mahara Institution is and how you can manage one. You will work as a Mahara staff member to set up course groups, which can have pages submitted to them. You will look at a possible workflow in Mahara for the assessment of work.
Chapter 7, Mahara Extensions explores some of the extensions that are available for Mahara. You will look at a plugin that allows you to track your continuing professional development and use the embedly block to embed content from web 2.0 sites in pages and more.
Appendix A, Mahara Implementation — Pre-Planner discusses some of the important questions your organization will need to address if you want to successfully get your ePortfolio system up live and running.
Appendix B, Installing Mahara covers the installation of Mahara, along with the requirements for installation.
Appendix C, Pop Quiz Answers contains the answers to the pop quiz questions.
What you need for this book
All you will need to get started with this book is access to the Internet via a web browser. You will be able to use the demonstration Mahara to go through the examples in the book (http://maharaforbeginners.tdm.info), but it would be useful if you had your own Mahara website in operation too (see Appendix B, Installing Mahara, for installation details).
Who this book is for
This book is for learners who want to maintain online documentation of their projects and share it with a particular teacher or trainer for feedback, educators who want to set up an ePortfolio for their students in order to encourage and advance personalized and reflective learning, or professionals who want to share journals and project documents with their team, capturing and sharing their existing knowledge and creating new knowledge in communities of professional practice.
Conventions
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
Time for action — heading
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
What just happened?
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
Pop quiz — heading
These are short multiple choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.
Have a go hero — heading
These set practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "In the example, Janet Norman uploaded a video file (.mov), but the file you upload in Mahara can be almost anything "
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "On the resulting page, fill in your details, agree to the terms and conditions (read them first), and click on Register to finish."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Errata
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Questions
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.
Chapter 1. What can Mahara do for you?
So you're interested in Mahara? Maybe you are already using it, but you are wondering if you are using it well. Maybe you've recently heard of Mahara and you are wondering if this is actually the ePortfolio solution you were looking for? Or, maybe you have been told to use it and you just need to get a sense of what Mahara is all about?
In subsequent chapters of this book, you will be digging into the nitty-gritty of getting your Mahara up and running, and then making it work for you as a learner or as a Mahara staff member. This particular book is not specifically pitched at helping Mahara site administrators. Before you start getting down to the basics of Mahara, you need to understand the big picture of what Mahara is about.
In this chapter you will:
So let's get on with it!
Portfolios go electronic
You have been learning things since the day you were born. I remember my little boy's first ever picture of a cowboy riding on a horse (it's great) that he made when he was four years old, and I will always remember the wooden toy truck that I made in my woodwork class when I was a teenager. I also proudly remember the written design paper that I had to write for my exam, which was about how I actually made that wooden truck, but now I have lost that design paper and I have no idea where it has gone. Today, I am heavily involved in online distance learning, more specifically ePortfolios, and rarely a day goes by when I don't learn something new.
Now, the thing is, all I now have are memories of my wooden truck, but if I had access back then to a digital ePortfolio, I could have kept a copy of that design paper. I could have scanned it into my computer and stored it as an image (if I hadn't created it digitally in the first place). I could have also stored a video of the 16-year old me showing off my wooden truck and I could have taken digital snapshots of the truck from all angles. If I was feeling really adventurous, I could have combined all these elements together and written about, or videoed myself speaking about how I conceived the idea and how I actually made it.
Maybe my friends would have been really impressed with my wooden truck and wanted to know how to make it, so they could have made one too. So, maybe I would have created a web page to show them. I could add all these videos, pictures, and commentaries to create a really useful and detailed resource page for my friends. Perhaps I didn't (yet) want the world to know about my new carpentry skills — especially not Barry down the road from the rival school. In this case, I could have set up a special group so only the people I selected would be able to view my wooden truck page. Maybe one of my friends would have really liked the truck, and showed his Dad, who was an engineer. Suppose they made one using my web page too, but with some tips from his Dad, they made one that went faster. He then started a forum discussing the improvements they had made. Then perhaps another couple of my friends joined in and got really excited. They shared with the group their own modifications which they had researched on the internet, uploaded a picture of an improved version to the group, and suggested we all got together once a week to work on one together and enter it in the county wooden truck championship.
And all along, without us being aware, let's imagine our teachers looking on smiling. They were watching us develop our IT skills and start off down the path of lifelong learning and collaborative working. They were watching us record our new-found learning and skills whilst developing complex social networking skills. The woodwork teacher sat back in his chair with a warm smile on his face. He knew he had taught me something of much greater worth than how to make a wooden truck.
However, this is all purely fantasy. I did not have access to an ePortfolio that had all this functionality, and the Internet back then was not much more than a concept.
Towards an ePortfolio-enabled future
I am now, however, a fully ePortfolio-enabled dad and I therefore helped my son (Salvador) to upload that picture of a cowboy on a horse. In the future, he can share it with his friends, and possibly with some other junior artistic talents, online. He is about to embark upon a lifelong learning journey, and now he (with a little help from Dad) can keep a record of his learning into posterity.
I, myself, also see the need to store and share the knowledge I am gathering about my professional life online. I want to work in a community of professionals (like yourself) using ePortfolios, who I can buzz with, share ideas with, and grow with. I want to engage with a professional community who I can give to and learn from. I want to keep my personal reflections and files to myself sometimes, to share some with my colleagues, and some to share with the rest of the world. I wish to create web pages as I see fit, not according to some predesigned fixed template. I want to use my creative skills to design web pages that I feel fit with my personal and professional style. I cannot do these things with Facebook or Bebo, I need the enhanced functionality and privacy that a socially interactive ePortfolio such as Mahara uses.
For both Salvador's needs and my own, I am going to use Mahara.
Why Mahara?
While they are not as old as the three-ring-binder and the artist's portfolio folder, digital ePortfolios have, nevertheless, actually been around for a long, long time. Have you ever stored your learning data on floppy disks, USB sticks, CDs, or DVDs? Maybe you've even created your own, personal Dreamweaver-produced or HTML/CSS website. Perhaps you've used a blogging engine such as WordPress, a content management system such as Drupal or Joomla!, or maybe a course management system such as Moodle. If you have, these are all types of ePortfolio, really.
None of these, however, were ever conceived to act as ePortfolio platforms in their own right. Mahara now gives us an ePortfolio system, which is thoughtfully and specifically designed for the job in hand. It allows us access to our own personalized learning environment. Mahara seeks to go beyond a basic ePortfolio and gives us a variety of other useful features to help us to learn reflectively and to work collaboratively.
Mahara is, therefore, a platform for personalized, reflective, and collaborative learning.
Personalized learning
Twenty-first century learning no longer needs to be delivered on somebody else's agenda. Mahara concerns itself with the personalization of the learning process:
Tip
What is a Mahara page?
Page is the Mahara word for a web page that you create by yourself in order to display your information, ideas, opinions, and personality. We will find out more about pages in Chapter 2, Getting Started with Mahara and Chapter 4,Organize and Showcase your Portfolio.
Tip
What is a Mahara artefact?
Artefact is the Mahara word for a bit of digital stuff, such as files, journals, plans, and profile or résumé information. You control other people's access to your stuff by deciding for yourself who can see the artefacts that you choose to display in your own pages. You won't see the term artefact used as you build your portfolio, but you might see it mentioned on the Mahara community website or in the Mahara documentation.
Reflective learning
But Mahara offers more than just being a way to store and to show off your stuff to others. Mahara encourages you to grow as a learner by reflecting on your own learning journey.
Tip
What is a Mahara journal?
The Mahara journal feature is similar to a blog or online diary. You can use it to take note of things you have been doing or to reflect on your work progress. You can share these thoughts with others by publishing them in Mahara pages.
Collaborative learning
While Mahara is a self-oriented learning platform — many call it a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) — it also facilitates informal learning activities amongst friends and groups:
Tip
What is a Mahara group?
This is Mahara's word for an online community that users can either:
You can use groups in a variety of ways, but they are predominately used in Mahara to develop, stimulate, and support both social and learning activities in a social networking context.
Mahara users can set up and follow links within Mahara from which you can seamlessly migrate directly over to a course that is running on a Moodle platform (you can refer Moodle Administration, Alex Büchner, Packt Publishing). You are also able to submit pages for assessment from Mahara to Moodle. With Moodle 2.0, you are able to bring good work that you did in your Moodle course over to your portfolio platform. Your informal, ongoing, and never-ending reflective learning experience isn't over once your taught course is done and dusted. Viva Mahara!
Pop quiz — what is important to you in an ePortfolio?
What do you need from an ePortfolio?
Grade the following ePortfolio criteria with a number on a scale of 1-5:
The criteria (in no particular order):
As you have probably already guessed, Mahara is capable of satisfying all of the preceding criteria.
Ways of using Mahara
Mahara can be used in lots of different ways towards lots of different ends. Here are just a few different examples:
