Mahara ePortfolios: Beginner's Guide: Create your own ePortfolio and communities of interest within an educational and professional organization with this book and ebook

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...

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....

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...

Mahara can be used in lots of different ways towards lots of different ends. Here are just a few different examples:

There is already a vibrant and active international Mahara community working together over at http://mahara.org. Mahara is all about collaborative learning and it's a great idea for you to come and join in. Not only is it exciting to become part of this active community, but you can also receive help and support, and as you become more confident, start giving your own suggestions to the Mahara team and complete the circle, fully engaging in the collaborative spirit!

The community site is itself based on the Mahara platform, that's to say, it has some of the same features as a standard Mahara instance (profiles, friends, forums, and so on). This is great because just by using the community site you get a feel of many of the Mahara features! It's important to note though, you should not use this site to try and build your own free ePortfolio; in fact, the Mahara terms and conditions prevent it. Luckily there are many other sites out there that serve this purpose;...

Let's register to mahara.org:

As Mahara is open source, and easily and freely downloadable, there are plenty of examples of Maharas grazing in the Safari that is, the Internet.

Most of these will be off limits to you as they are monitored by professional or educational institutions, there are however a few that you can sign up to.

We've already seen that mahara.org is one such Mahara, but remember this site isn't for ePortfolio building. There are a couple of other sites we would like to highlight as being useful for getting you going with Mahara — useful if you don't have your own site set up yet and would like to have a play around.

Let's get going and have a look at a couple of real-life Maharas:

We learned a lot in this chapter about why Mahara ePortfolios are useful.

Specifically, we understood what an ePortfolio is and looked at possible uses of Mahara. We discussed the importance of personalized, reflective, and collaborative learning and learned what is so special about the Mahara ePortfolio.

We also looked at some real-life Mahara sites. Hopefully, you became a member of the Mahara community by joining yourself up at http://mahara.org. If you did, you would have had a browse around mahara.org and looked at some of the useful features. Finally, some of you would have gotten an initial feel for Mahara by clicking around in the demo area http://demo.mahara.org and also in http://foliofor.me or one of the other free ePortfolio sites mentioned.

Now that we've seen the big picture as to why Mahara matters, you're probably keen to start working in your live Mahara environment. First of all, it's a good idea to get started by adding some of your information to your portfolio,...