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
1. Action 1
2. Action 2
3. Action 3
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.
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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