Collections are simply a way of combining several pages together into one entity. They are really useful for creating a coherent story when you feel that one page alone doesn't give you enough space to do so.
Here are a few things that you can do with collections:
- Link pages together and give them a navigational block, so that they can be easily navigated between
- Order the pages to your liking, not necessarily alphabetically
- Give access to a whole collection rather than each page at a time
- Copy a whole collection
With pages in Mahara, you can create a mini-website with individual pages, a navigation system, and the ability to share it with whoever you like. Let's have a look at a few ideas for how you can use collections:
- In a topical approach to a school project: The students might prepare a "The Tudors" collection of different pages including, for example: "Science and the Tudors", "Language and the Tudors", "Theatre and the Tudors", "Politics and the Tudors", "Religion and Tudors", and so on.
- A rich and immersive résumé/CV: Create an impressive and in-depth résumé/CV collection. Allow the audience to see projects that you've worked on or some of the work that you've produced. Provide downloads of a corporate scannable CV, but really show off what you're capable of!
- A modern style scientific paper format: You could use a collection to structure a science report. This could have images, videos, hyperlinks, reflective journal entries, and perhaps embedded presentations that you've used! Use a page for each section such as "Introduction", "Research", "Results", "Conclusion", and so on.
- In a business context: A Project Manager may wish to submit a collection of pages, for example, "Finance", "HR", "Vision", "Partnerships", and so on, for a review in a meeting.
- Supporting notes for a presentation: Put together notes on different subjects, for example, "Free Software for Education", "What is Open Source?", "Lists of popular Open Source tools", "Open Source legal and licensing issues", and so on.
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Christophe from Silverworks University thinks: | |
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Collections are an absolutely wonderful feature! I will ask my students to put together a collection of their final project showing off all the work that they have been doing. I will recommend to them that they structure their collection to show the development of their work, with four pages — overview, inspirations, development, and final work. Having said that — I'm going to keep the brief quite open to give them flexibility and see what they come up with. When they've made their collections, we'll be able to allow access to the public and share the links on the Silverworks Final Show website as a promotional tool for our students. |
Christophe is due to give a demonstration of the collections feature to his tutor group before they get going on creating their own and is going to use one of his own recent projects as an example. So, let's show you and Christophe how to make your first collection.