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.
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:
- Personalized self-presentation: Mahara offers an easy-to-use web interface that allows you to design your own web pages, or simply pages, so that you can organize and present your own learning data precisely in the way you would like to present it. You are clearly able to demonstrate that you fully understand a subject.
- Privacy: If you want somewhere to collect your thoughts and files, you probably want these to remain private until you decide that you are ready to show them to someone else. In Mahara, you now have a fairly private (only you and the administrator(s) can access your files) area on the Internet where you can keep your stuff, such as files (documents, videos, audio clips, images, and so on). You can also use this private space to write a journal as well as your ever-changing profile and résumé information.
- Accessible: You can access your private stuff whenever you like from wherever you can log into the Internet. Wow! This beats carrying your data around on a USB stick, doesn't it? No more forgotten or lost files. Access your files at work, at school, at the library, or even when you are sitting on the beach in Barbados. Mahara gives you freedom!
- Transfer your data: What about when you move schools and change companies? What happens to your data then? Many ePortfolios "lock you in" in such a way that you won't be able to transfer your data when the time comes to move. Who wants that? Mahara allows you to export your data as HTML and to create a LEAP2A object for moving your portfolio to other Mahara sites and other portfolio systems that support the format.
- Access control: In Mahara you — the user — retain the right to control who gets access over your own artefacts. You do this by setting up pages of your digital data artefacts and then deciding who gets to see them. You are also able to create groups to allow different groups of people to access different portfolio pages. Well, you wouldn't want your boss to see that picture of the office party, would you? This is another reason why Mahara is better than so many of those Web 2.0 social networking sites. You might want to work with your suppliers on a joint marketing campaign, but do you really want to share your company's sensitive financial reports with them, too? Mahara lets you satisfy all of these different needs neatly and easily. One warning though: if you pull in images, videos, and files from other web sites, it is only on these sites that you control access to those files. Mahara only has access control over content that is uploaded to your Mahara portfolio. If that photo is hosted on Flickr, for example, then the boss may still be able to see it if they can access your Flickr profile.
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.
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.
- Developing your own goals and skills: Mahara encourages you to record, reflect on and update your personal, academic, and work/career-related goals and skills. It has even created special sections just to facilitate this. Life is a journey, our dreams and objectives are in constant flux. If you've misplaced that notebook or scrap of paper with "New Year Resolutions" on it, how can you know if you've kept them? Now with Mahara you can easily check back to see that you are still on the right learning pathway. Everything is all in one place!
- Keeping journals: Ever kept a diary or a journal? Ever made notes to yourself? Keeping a journal can be a very useful way of encouraging you to stop and think about the things you have been doing, to reflect on, and to learn from your experience, and to process the things you have been studying. Taking some time out to reflect and compose thoughts is a highly useful exercise. You can now keep as many journals as you like, all in one place, stored together with your goals, skills, and files. You keep the journals for yourself, not necessarily publishing them for others to view. You can, of course, move on to put your journals into portfolio pages for others to access if you want to, or if you are asked to! You can keep a personal journal, a work journal, a project journal, and a journal to share with your friends!
- Integration with other platforms (including Web 2.0): Mahara is set up to allow for integrations with other online spaces. At the moment you can call in RSS feeds from your blog (outside of Mahara) or CMS. You are also able to call in content from a wide range of Web 2.0 tools including Twitter, Slideshare, YouTube, TeacherTube, and many more! Mahara can be seen as a personalized, reflective learning space where you can gather together all of your learning artefacts and store them internally within Mahara or externally within other locations on the World Wide Web.
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:
- Making friends: Many of us learn best when we are working together with other people. For this reason, Mahara encourages social collaboration. You can present your pages with a different profile picture to different people and communities. You can find members who have similar interests to yourself and by contacting them from their profile pages, start to build a network of friends. You can then add some of your friends' pages to a watchlist that will let you know when they have been updated with new information. You are able to place feedback on other people's pages and to allow others to place feedback on yours, giving each other advice and support, and in this way, act as both teacher and learner. With Mahara's social networking features, social learning can take place — the teacher-student division is broken down and everyone can be involved in the learning process. Before long, your online learning community is born!
- Working and learning in groups: Life is more fun when shared with others! It's time to get down to some learning and working together in groups! You can join and set up for yourself different types of groups for different types of learning communities (for more detail refer to Chapter 5, Share and Network in Groups). In your groups you can share common files, you can share your own pages for others to see or work together on pages that you create as a group. You can also engage in group discussion forums to really get your reflective learning into gear!
Tip
What is a Mahara group?
This is Mahara's word for an online community that users can either:
- Join
- Request membership of
- Be invited to
- Or (sometimes) be selected into in a more controlled way
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.
- Using groups for assessment of learning: Mahara staff members working within the controlled Mahara groups can encourage learners to submit pages to the group for formal assessment. This is an excellent way of tracking progress on formal and evidence-based qualifications.
- Integration with Moodle: Sometimes, it is useful for a teacher to take learners through a staged sequence of learning objectives using quizzes and other formal learning activities, on which performance can be assessed and reported on in a grade book. Mahara doesn't provide this as its core functionality, although it is increasingly being used to achieve this. Mahara is a place for informal learning, not a taught Course Management System. Luckily, Mahara's "sister" program steps in here — Moodle (http://moodle.org). Where Mahara is about demonstrating learning, Moodle is about delivering it. It is a Course Management System, which can be set up to run in the background of Mahara, sharing single sign-on access.
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!
What do you need from an ePortfolio?
Grade the following ePortfolio criteria with a number on a scale of 1-5:
- 5: Vitally important
- 4: Very important
- 3: Important
- 2: Not very important
- 1: Not important at all
The criteria (in no particular order):
- _____ You own your own data and can control who has access to it.
- _____ You get your own file storage area (like you have on your own computer, for example, My Documents), which you can access, modify, and control via the Internet.
- _____ Your ePortfolio is portable, allowing you to migrate your data from provider to provider on your lifelong learning journey.
- _____ You have opportunities for reflective learning via blogs/journals, learning/career goal-setting, group projects, and so on.
- _____ You have the opportunity for social networking in interest groups with forum discussions.
- _____ You have creative freedom over the personalized presentation of your own learning. You can stylize your portfolio pages according to your own preferences/needs.
- _____ You get the chance to show off your stuff to other people, for example, you can show your learning achievements, résumé details, and so on to potential employers.
- _____ The ePortfolio allows you to link in your stuff from Web 2.0 social networking sites such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.
- _____ Your personal ePortfolio integrates seamlessly with the learning programs you pursue on your institution or company Moodle virtual learning environment (http://moodle.org).
- _____ The ePortfolio grants you your right to know that nothing untoward is happening to your data by opening the software source code to public view and scrutiny.
- _____ The ePortfolio allows the learning provider organization to avoid locking in its own and your personal data into a proprietary data format, which belongs to a particular software company.
- _____ The ePortfolio is a community-supported open source platform, which is modular and open to modification, meaning that providers can work collaboratively to make the platform work better for their common (and also for their very particular) ePortfolio needs.
- _____ The ePortfolio can be configured to offer controlled groups a "submit for assessment" process — allowing an assessor (or external verifier) to easily verify that you have done your work — in the same way that they would do with a paper-based or USB-stick-based portfolio assessment process.
- _____ While using the ePortfolio for formal assessment via accrediting bodies, the ePortfolio can be integrated with sophisticated open source Individual Learning Plan (ILP) and assessment manager tools (such as The ULCC Personalisation of Learning Framework at http://moodle.ulcc.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=139).
As you have probably already guessed, Mahara is capable of satisfying all of the preceding criteria.