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Mahara 1.2 E-Portfolios: Beginner's Guide

Chapter 2. Getting Started with Mahara

Now that we have understood some of the potential of Mahara it's time to get started. The very first thing you are going to do is to register for a Mahara site, log in, and set up your own personal profile page.

In this chapter we shall:

Register to join the demonstration Mahara that accompanies this book
Explore the Mahara user interface
Enter your personal information
Think about what goes into our own profile page and start configuring it
Have a brief introduction to the Mahara text editor

By the end of the chapter, you will have set up your own profile page in Mahara and be ready to start adding your "stuff".

Registering with a Mahara site

I'm sure you can't wait to get inside a Mahara site and have a look around. Luckily, for this book we have created a demonstration site, so you can do just that.

Usually, a Mahara site administrator will provide you with your own username and password so that you can log in straight away. Sometimes though, to join a Mahara...

Key benefits

Create, customize, and maintain an impressive personal digital portfolio with a simple point-and-click interface

Set customized access to share your text files, images, and videos with your family, friends, and others

Create online learning communities and social networks through groups, blogs, and forums

A step-by-step approach that takes you through examples with ample screenshots and clear explanations

Description

Mahara is a user-centred environment with a permissions framework that enables different views of an e-portfolio to be easily managed. These views helps you display your artefacts – text files, spreadsheets, images, and videos – in a way you choose and to the people you want. You can also create online communities and social networks through groups, blogs, and forums.Being a novice, you will need a quick and easy implementation guide to set up your feature-rich digital portfolio.This book is your 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.This book will introduce to the exciting features of Mahara framework and help you develop a feature-rich e-portfolio for yourself. You will see how easily you can create folders, upload multiple files like journals, project documents, pictures, and videos and share them with your friends. You will learn to set up views of these files, making these visible to your chosen friends only. And then, you will allow people to give their inputs.You will learn to create blogs and forums and get connected to the rest of the world. Customization and administration of your Mahara site will become 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.

Who is this book for?

Pick this book up if you want to get started with Mahara.This book is for you if: You are a student/learner wanting to maintain online documentation of your projects and share it with a particular teacher/trainer for feedback You are a teacher wanting to set up an e-portfolio for your students in order to encourage and advance personalized and reflective learning You are a professional wanting to share your journals and project documents with your team by sharing your existing knowledge and creating new knowledge in communities of professional practice No previous experience of Mahara is required.

What you will learn

You will learn to:

Create folders in Mahara – just like on your own computer – with an easy file search facility

Upload multiple files – journals, reports, presentations, videos, and sound clips – easily and set permissions for your group to view, edit, and delete them

Create a blog in Mahara and get connected to the rest of the world

Make an impressive profile using Mahara profile fields and tailor your own profile view

Create a new web page entirely from scratch and customize it to allow much more flexibility and control over who sees what and when

Set an environment to receive public or private feedback on your pictures, videos, and articles

Connect with other Mahara users and get social: discuss topics of common interest in forums and share views with each other

Customize and administer your Mahara site to our own preferences using a number of configuration settings for easy administration

What do you get with Print?

Instant access to your digital eBook copy whilst your Print order is Shipped

Paperback book shipped to your preferred address

Download this book in EPUB and PDF formats

Access this title in our online reader with advanced features

DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want

Frequently bought together

Mahara 1.2 E-Portfolios: Beginner's Guide

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€31.99

€45.99

Total € 110.97

Dan Marsden Feb 19, 2010

I'd recommend this book to anyone new to ePortfolios or new to Mahara - it gives the reader a really good detailed knowledge of not only the features of Mahara, but how they can be used in a variety of ways for very different groups of people. The book is great for real users - teachers/students/educators - it gives a much "easier to digest", concise guide than the [...] online documentation. It's not aimed at Administrators or Developers but if you haven't implemented Mahara yet it gives some good information for new administrators or those considering Mahara's suitability towards the end of the book. I'd highly recommend that any organisation running Mahara grabs a hard copy of the book to lend someone when they walk into your office and ask "so what's this Mahara thing?Disclosure: as a member of the Mahara community I received a free copy of this book to review.

Amazon Verified review

C. Voigt Apr 03, 2010

The book is nicely structured, which means (for me) that the book cares about readers who have questions and cannot read a book from cover to cover to find the answer. Every chapter combines some prose (purpose of a given ePortfolio, benefits you can expect if you do x, y or z, etc) with some hands-on action. You could even do a quiz in each chapter ... this seems a good feature if you just skim read a chap and want to know whether you missed to understand an important concept.Another useful thing is the way three different case studies are build up throughout the book. Each case study is used to look at Mahara from a different angle (school, corporate training, and vocational training). Personally, I was looking forward to learn more about the possibilities to drive assessment and I found an 11 step process on page 195 ... The more important thing, however was an explanation on how to use course groups as a way by which learners can submit parts of their ePortfolio which can't be changed until a tutor or lecturer has given his/her feedback and released it back to the student. In the end I believe it's a highly recommendable book for beginners and one can only hope that there will be a similar guide for more advanced users of Mahara soon.

Lauren Kane Apr 21, 2010

Suprisingly for a textbook, the Mahara Beginner's Guide is written in very down-to-earth and easy-to-read language. For new users, it is a quick and easy implementation guide to set up a feature-rich ePortfolio that teaches you how to "display your own stuff in your chosen way". I don't usually enjoy reading text books from cover to cover, however this book really pulled me in. It was relatable and full of real case studies and practical examples. The authors made the experience very interactive and hands on, quite different to that of other textbooks and reference materials. I also noted that it followed the good old teaching technique of: Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you've told them- very effective and encouraging!I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is new to Mahara as well as to experienced users who want to polish their knowledge and perhaps even learn or consider a new thing or two!As a member of the Mahara community, I received a copy of this book to review. You can read the full version at: [...]

Nik Mohd Ramli Nov 14, 2016

Item as described.

David Mudrak Sep 21, 2010

Mahara 1.3 RC1 has been released and the list of new features is promising. Does it mean that the book Mahara 1.2 E-Portfolios: Beginner's Guide is now outdated? I am pretty sure it is not. If you are just about to start with Mahara, either current stable version or the new one, you will find the book useful.The book was published by Packt Publishing in February 2010 and I got a chance to read it recently. I was looking forward to it because as a teacher who had some personal experience with implementing Mahara at secondary and high school level, I was wondering what way of introducing e-portfolios to the students the authors recommend.The guide was written by Derrin Michael Kent, Glenys Gillian Bradbury, Margaret Anne Kent, Richard William Hand. This team represents a balanced group of people with solid background in educational technology, open-source development, end-user training and learning design, too.While reading the book, I enjoyed the focus on instant action. Since very first pages, reader can start experimenting with Mahara features being introduced. The concepts of the software are illustrated in many use cases from various environments like primary school, international corporate university or vocational training provider. These examples and scenarios helped me to extend my existing attitude to Mahara as I tended to see it as a software for schools only.After the initial introduction into the environment, creating an account and setting up the user profile, the book guides the reader through key elements of Mahara system - artefacts, blocks and views. I appreciate that the authors managed to satisfy both kinds of readers. Those who need detailed step by step instructions on how to work with Mahara user interface will use the book as very well written manual. And those who prefer to explore the environment on their own by just playing with it will find some inspirative examples to think about.In seven chapters, the book covers basically all available features of Mahara 1.2 including the users interaction, groups and institutions management and site administration. Touching all these areas, it offers a clear overview of what Mahara is and help you to decide if it would suite your needs.When I was explaining Mahara concepts to my students, we were able to prepare their first views during the first lesson. Of course, by just telling them click here, click there, it is not difficult at all in fact. Mahara has pretty, modern user interface, intuitive for people who are familiar with Internet social networks. But after reading this book, I was able to provide them more examples and think of other projects and situations where we could use Mahara successfully.You will be able to become Maharan without this book, definitely. But if you are going to explain what Mahara is and how to work with it effectively to the others, this book is written for you.

Mahara 1.2 E-Portfolios: Beginner's Guide: Create and host educational and professional e-portfolios and personalized learning communities

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