Let's discuss changing your settings:
- Click on the Settings button in the control panel menu on the top right of the screen:
- You will now be on a page called Settings. On this page, you have a number of options available, the first is to change your password. You may feel like you can't remember your old password very well and want to switch to a more memorable one. If you need to, try entering a new password for yourself. Enter your current password along with the new password and a confirmation of your new password.
- Next, you have the option to change username. Perhaps your current username is too long and you would like to shorten it. Type in a new username for yourself. Ensure that you remember your new username. The username you choose must be available and should not be already taken by another user. Some users might not have this option available depending on how the site administrator has set things up. Janet decided to change her username from Janet to Jan:
- You will then see a group of General account options. The first is to allow you to control who is your friend in the site. You will find out more about friends and authentication later, so leave this as it is for now.
- Leave the HTML editor option set to On because you will be needing it.
- If you choose to tick the Disable e-mail field, then Mahara won't send you any messages to your e-mail inbox. As a site administrator, Janet definitely wants to keep this unselected. You should never really tick this as you are able to control where you would like to receive mail more specifically via the notification settings. There, you can ask to only receive mail to the Mahara inbox if you wish.
- Messages from other users are set to Allow anyone to send me messages, which is fine for now because you want others to contact you, but you could restrict this if you want to make things more private.
- If you are interested, have a look through the next three options and decide whether you want to change them or not. We will discuss these features later in the book.
- Finally, the Homepage information option refers to the dashboard page information section, which we discussed earlier. I think it's a good idea to include it, but you may decide not to — it's up to you.
You have just learned about the settings that are available to you in your Mahara portfolio. You found out how to change your username and password and about a few of the more general options. If you change your username and password, and find that you have made the wrong choice, you can set them back to what they originally were by revisiting your settings.
Tip
Mobile upload token
You may have seen a setting related to a mobile upload token when you were looking through your settings. This allows you to send files straight from your Smartphone to your Mahara files area when used with the MaharaDroid Google Android application. This feature must be enabled by an adminstrator and requires some configuration on your Smartphone.
Now, let's look in more detail at a couple of the settings that you saw in the preceding Time for action — changing your settings section, thinking about why and when you would change your settings.
Before changing your username or password, you should be certain that you will remember the new details. You may need to change your password if you feel that you find it difficult to remember, perhaps you have a standard password for lots of online activities (for example, instant messaging/e-mail) and would like to use this for your Mahara too. Another good reason to change your password is because you have accidentally revealed it to someone else and now want to protect your own privacy.
Very rarely will you want to change your username. More often than not your username will have been set by your administrator and they are likely to have a naming system for all usernames in the site. It is best to check with your administrator before changing your username.
You can choose to use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor in Mahara, which makes your experience of typing into Mahara similar to that of using a basic word processor. It also gives you the ability to edit HTML code, if you know how to do this. This gives you more flexibility while creating content in your portfolio. Some people switch this option off because they prefer to enter plain text. It's your choice.