Let's have a first look at your profile page:
- Start by clicking on the Portfolio tab in the main menu. By default you will be in the page's section of your portfolio. You will be looking at this section in more detail in Chapter 4, Organize and Showcase Your Portfolio. For now, you will notice that there are already two pages — your Dashboard page and Profile page.
- Click on the link for your Profile page.
- Scroll down the page and look at the different sections. Can you see the section for My Pages? This is probably empty at the moment, but as you start adding pages, they will appear here. Similarly, it is unlikely that the My Groups section has any information in it yet. The About Me block in the top left is also looking empty. Here is what Janet's profile page looks like at the moment:
- Have a look at your wall. Try typing a message directly into the box in the Wall section and click on the Post button. If you are just playing around with it at the moment, it might be best to tick the little box Make your post private?, so no one else can see it.
- Go and have a look at Derrin's mahara.org profile page at https://mahara.org/user/view.php?id=106. This will allow you to see what a more populated profile page can look like (you won't need to sign in because Derrin's Mahara page is accessible to anyone):
You just viewed your profile page for the first time ever and learned a bit about how it is organized initially.
When you add your personal information, Mahara remembers it all and uses it to automatically enter details to save you time. Information from your profile is autoloaded into different sections of your profile page depending on whether you have chosen to display it or not.
At the moment, your profile page will be looking quite empty. You would have probably noticed that there are sections for groups, friends, and pages, but no information is shown in these sections. This is because you haven't added any groups, friends, or pages yet!
You just found out how to post on the wall on your profile page, but what is it and what is it used for?
The wall gets used as a place where people post messages, which are directly and publicly aimed at you (as opposed to messages in forums that are aimed at closed groups of people and system messages, which are privately sent to you). Anybody who visits your profile page will see what has been written about you on your wall. This means you have to think carefully before writing on someone else's wall, as it is open to other Mahara site users and maybe even to the Internet, if shared publicly.
We also touched on the idea of making your own post private. This essentially turns your wall post into a message as it can't be seen by everyone. A private wall post will be viewable only by the user to whom that wall belongs.
To see a good example of a Mahara wall being used, visit a former Mahara core developer, Nigel McNie's wall at https://mahara.org/blocktype/wall/wall.php?id=12.
Having a look at some other's profile pages can give you ideas on content and construction. If you go back to https://mahara.org/user/view.php?id=106 and click on some of Derrin's friends, you can see some more profile pages. Many of them have made their Mahara profile pages open to be viewed by the public in just the same way as Derrin has. Other people require you to sign in to Mahara before you view their profile pages.
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Punam from Pennytown Primary thinks: | |
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All logged-in users can see my profile page, so my own learners and also learners and teachers from other schools are going to be able to visit it. I will be able to show off some of the things that interest me, but I don't want to put up too many contact details. I don't want calls from my learners at 11:30 at night. |
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Janet Norman from PI Inc. thinks: | |
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I am going to suggest that all PI Inc. users leave their pages available for logged-in users only, but I am not going to enforce this because some branch directors may wish their staff to make their profile pages public for some reason or other. I will definitely be encouraging staff to put up contact details such as their addresses, phone numbers, blog pages, messaging usernames, and so on. It will be a useful way of quickly finding out someone's details within Mahara rather than accessing our separate employee database. As for my own personal profile page, I need to use it to show both who I am and why I am excited about using Mahara as a personalized learning platform, using it to cross international boundaries and bring all of our staff closer together in our working practices. |
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Neil from Training for Work thinks: | |
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My profile page will only be seen by students and by other staff members, although some of the clients we provide training for may come and look at it. I am not going to let people view my profile page unless they are logged-in. It is there for the learners to find out how to contact me, really. I think I will populate my own page with contact information for myself and I might include some of my basic CV details. |
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Christophe from Silverworks University thinks: | |
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My profile page is not only there to give people my contact details but also I am using it to draw in my Twitter tweets as an RSS feed. It displays images and videos of a representative sample of my professional work. It also shows people many of my career successes, drawn from my résumé, a YouTube video where I introduce myself, my work, and my social and leisure interests. I have added some styled text box entries in which I give even more information about my work and leisure interests. I want my profile page to give people a rich sense of who I am. |
You can do lots of different things with your profile page. Let's start by looking at something that you can add.