Yesterday, 5 August 2014 New York time, the New York Mahara User Group (MUG) met at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. The day started out for me by saying goodbye to Pleasantville, which indeed is very pleasant, where I visited with Beth from Pace University. She is one of the organizers of MUG New York and a long-time Mahara user.
We arrived right on time without a minute to spare for the start of the meeting because what would New York be without some traffic hiccups? 😉 Fortunately, I had already toured the Faculty Commons of Pratt two weeks ago and knew where we needed to go and what the room looked like. the Faculty Commons is an area for faculty to gather for learning about new technology, trying things out with the assistance of the Learning Technologies team and getting inspired by other users.
It was fantastic to see a great group of 15 Mahara enthusiasts from a number of institutions gathered. We could also welcome a number of people remotely. Unfortunately, the microphone did not work out well, and we ran into technology problems making it difficult for some of our remote participants to continue being in the session. Hopefully, future meetings will run more smoothly in that regard. However, 4 or 5 soldiered on, and it was great to get Sam T’s input from Southampton Solent University on assessment, support, badges and Mahara goodness in general.
If the video recording of the meeting worked out, it will be shared for any follow-ups. Beth will also share the resources that Sam mentioned so everyone can take a closer look at them.
We received a brief update from Pratt on using ePortfolios, discussed assessment possibilities and how to support users in working with assessments, and looked at a couple of work flows besides getting people excited and talking about badges and how they can work with them in Mahara.
Attendees were very interested in Sam’s work flows that she showed, and it was suggested to create an area where work flows could be shared.
The face-to-face MUG meeting was great because it fostered a different kind of interaction between the participants. Since we were sitting in one room, discussions were easier than if everyone were online. Sadly, the online participants didn’t have a great experience, but we hope they’ll stick with the group and participate next time that there is a purely online meeting. This will most likely happen at the end of October / beginning of November.
Take-aways
This MUG meeting was very helpful because it confirmed some things I already knew and sparked interest in exploring certain ideas further.
MUGs and MUGgers
User group meetings are great to facilitate discussions amongst users, share ideas, help each other, and connect people. Sam Egan and Beth Gordon from Pace University, who are the main organizers of the New York MUG do a fantastic job with these meetings. They are joined in their triumvirate by Keith Landa from Purchase College who makes the webinar technology available allowing remote participation and also the recording of the meetings.
Face-to-face beats online hands down
Face-to-face meetings still beat online meetings by far. I was fortunate to meet a bunch of Mahara users over the past two weeks and learn how they use Mahara and areas that they would like to explore.
Resources pool expansion
We are going to have areas on the wiki where users can share work flows for commonly used processes as well as templates that they have created. I am also thinking how to link to this in the Mahara user manual in an attempt to include more resources on the portfolio creation process and not just keep it as reference manual. This can be part of the crowdsourcing for expanding the Mahara user manual that I spoke about at Mahara UK in July.
Exploring badging
Badges are a hot topic and not one that is quickly discussed but needs a lot of thought and discussion at individual institutions. It is great that Mahara already has two plugins to display badges and to issue badges. I’d love to see colleges and universities discussing badges download these plugins and install them on a testing server to experiment with them and feed back their ideas about the functionality and possibilities of expanding them to make them work for their circumstances.
Badges are still a new idea in education, and thus, experimentation is needed to gain more insight. Don’t get me wrong, a whole lot of research has already been conducted or is currently under way, and badges are not thought of as just individual badges but as part of a badging ecosystem. However, there is still more work needed to implement it at more institutions and find the hooks why individual institutions might want to join the badging community.
So what is next?
There are few things in the making:
- Canadian Mahara User Group meeting
- Sharing of templates as Leap2A files for easy importing into other Mahara instances
- Sharing of work flows
- Organizing of the next New York MUG meeting which will be held online
If you want to get active in any of these initiatives or see what others are sharing, stay tuned for updates and links to the various resources on mahara.org or via Twitter.
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