Let's get started and see how you can create a Mahara journal:
You just learned how to use journals within Mahara. Later in this chapter, you will be seeing how you can add these to your dashboard page.
You saw how to create a journal and add entries to it. You have to be careful in Mahara to understand the difference between the two. A journal should be given a more general name, and should contain journal entries related to the subject area. Compare the journal with the front cover of a paper-based diary and the journal entries with the page titles. For example, a journal may be entitled "My fitness regime". The journal entries are the individual articles of the journal. A journal entry within the "My fitness regime" journal may be called "Day 1 - Gym session".
You revisited your settings page and learned how to allow multiple journals. It is recommended that you do this if you want to start writing on multiple topics or for different audiences. Otherwise, if you are happy with keeping a simple, private, and reflective log of your thoughts, the default personal journal will be fine for you.
Now, you should have started to think about the kinds of journals that you would like to write. Perhaps you want to write an end-of-week report, that you will want to share with your boss, or with your students. Perhaps you would like to write a funny weekend diary to share with a few of your friends. Perhaps you have a passion, a topic that you want to engage a Mahara group with so that you can share your rants and ramblings with the world. Don't be scared to have a go — nobody needs to look at what you write if you don't want them to. Remember this is for you and it doesn't have to be perfect.
Neil from Training for Work thinks: | |
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I mustn't confuse my journals with my journal entries. A journal contains many entries. Therefore, I should not create a journal entitled "May Report" — I should call my journal "EE Progress Reports" and write various entries in that journal called "May Report", "June Report", and so on. I also need to remember who the intended audience is for my journals. "EE Progress Reports" is going to be for my boss — so I can write some fairly personal stuff about individual students. "Neil's Notes" is going to be a private space for me, I am never going to publish this in a page, so I can write what I like in here. "EE Course Update" is a journal that I am going to publish for my learners to view. I will need to keep what I write in here depersonalized, and always upbeat and positive. |
In the last Time for action — creating your first Mahara journal section, you saw that Neil made a very simple textual journal entry. One great feature of Mahara is that you are able to add audio, video, and images to your journal entries. You saw that to do this, when creating your journal entry, you should click on the Add a file button at the bottom of the journal entry creation screen. Select the file to add it to your journal:
Now that the file has been added to your entry, you can use the image upload icon in the body of your entry to include the file you just added. You will see a drop-down called Attached image that lists all the attached images for you to include. Once you have added the image to your entry you are able to align it and resize it as you wish.
Punam from Pennytown Primary thinks: | |
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I don't think my nine-year old pupils are really cognitively ready to use journals as a reflective learning tool. They could use journals as a way of telling me what work they have done during the week, though. This will encourage them to think more carefully about what they do in their project time in class. It is also a way for me to see whether they are doing their homework activities or not. |
Janet Norman from PI Inc. thinks: | |
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Journals will be central to PI Inc.'s work. Not only do we need PI Inc. staff to grow from their reflection as they write their journals, but we also need to encourage knowledge transfer between people working in similar roles in different branches and in different countries. We will, therefore, need to get people producing interesting journals, which they will be publishing for others to read within their different interest groups. We will benefit as an organization if we can encourage our staff to think creatively and to exchange their knowledge! Journals will facilitate this. |
Neil from Training for Work thinks: | |
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I am writing journals by myself for different audiences within my Mahara site. I am going to use Mahara to write a journal on electrical engineering topics, which I am going to make public on the World Wide Web and advertise at conferences and in trade journals. I am also going to get my learners writing individual journals on a weekly basis for me to read in their WBL evidence pages. This way, I can track their individual progress on the course and open up an online channel of communication between me and each and every one of them. |
As a personalized learning environment, Mahara is very keen to get you reflecting on your learning. Journals are a key tool for you to use to do that. If you take time to sit down and express what you understand about something in writing, you will generally find you come out of the experience knowing and understanding more about your topic area than you did before you started.
If you are blogging or keeping a diary already, try writing a journal in Mahara, we think you will like it. If you have never written a journal before, get started now, you really won't regret it!
Reflecting is one of the most important parts of the portfolio process. Helen Barrett and Jonathon Richter have developed a good set of resources on the subject — it's worth a look (https://sites.google.com/site/reflection4learning/Home).