Review of the Mahara 1.4 Cookbook

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Mahara 1.4 CookbookWhat makes a delicious meal? It’s not just the individual ingredients, but how they are blended together in a mouth-watering composition. Cookbooks help both amateur and professional cooks to get this blend right and to get inspired to create variations on the presented recipes. Ellen Marie Murphy authored the Mahara 1.4 Cookbook* for cooks new to Mahara but also for those experienced in its use to give them fresh ideas of how to use this web application.

Mahara is an open source ePortfolio web application that has been in existence since 2006. It is used around the world in compulsory, higher, and further education, and other institutions by people to compile their evidence of learning, to reflect on their learning, and to collaborate in projects. Version 1.4 of Mahara was released in June 2011.

Ellen Marie Murphy is well-positioned to write a cookbook on Mahara because she is an active user and community member. Before she became Director of Online Curriculum at SUNY Empire State College in September 2011, she was Director of Learning Technologies and Online Education at Plymouth State University where Mahara is in use. In October 2010, Plymouth State University organized the New Hampshire Focus on ePortfolio Day to bring educators from K-12 and higher education together to share ideas about their ePortfolio use with each other.

The Mahara 1.4 Cookbook contains 52 varied recipes in eight different categories. Whether you want to use Mahara for the visual arts, literature and writing, create your professional portfolio with it, work in groups, create an education portfolio with primary school kids, a social portfolio, a college application portfolio or use it for certification and accreditation in higher education, you find ideas in this cookbook. There are simple and short recipes that help you create a portfolio page within just a few minutes. And there are more complex recipes that guide you through the creation of a multi-page portfolio in which artifacts collected over a long period of time are arranged.

The recipes can be followed by new users of Mahara as well as “old hats”. After a brief explanation of the purpose of the recipe and a screenshot that shows an example, Ellen Marie offers step-by-step instructions that lead beginners to the goal. Experienced users of Mahara can go through the recipes more quickly as they already know the processes for uploading files, creating journal entries and pages etc., and can focus on the innovative ideas Ellen Marie provides for portfolios. These ideas allow learners to create engaging, visually pleasing, and informative portfolios which they can expand over time for their own professional purposes, to showcase it to others, or to use it in an application process, for example.

The recipes often include additional tips and tricks which give learners further insight and options to vary the recipes and to adapt them. References to other recipes in the book help especially new users to find related content and to continue exploring Mahara by following authentic activities.

In my opinion, the Mahara 1.4 Cookbook is a valuable reference book for any Mahara user who wishes to get fresh ideas for working with his / her portfolio. It is also a great resource for educators who want to use ePortfolios with their students in finding ways to encourage their students to reflect on their learning regularly and to compile their portfolios. Although the step-by-step instructions correspond to version 1.4 of Mahara, those who work on an older version of Mahara can still benefit from the presented ideas, and most recipes can be followed on an older version with only slight navigational changes.

The Mahara 1.4 Cookbook is the second book written for Mahara and it follows in the steps of Mahara 1.2 E-Portfolios: Beginner’s Guide as fantastic resource for Mahara users. It can be purchased as eBook and as paper book.

Two thumbs up!

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* By using this link to the Cookbook, you are supporting development work on Mahara.

You can engage in the Mahara community discussions and trial the application yourself.

Thank you to Packt Publishing for a copy of the eBook for review.

The Antarctic blast

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Sure, when the season you are in is called winter, any Northern European expects snow, Christmas lights and skate rinks. However, when you live in Wellington, snow would normally not enter your mind because the winter is wet, you are at sea level and generally the temperature doesn’t drop below 5°C.

But, you can be proven wrong, especially when an Antarctic blast moves over the country and brings severe weather conditions with it that do not only make it snow in Wellington but also up in sunny Auckland. As people here are not used to snow, the state of emergency is almost called: you should stock up on food and water, power outages are expected, schools and roads close.

Fortunately, it’s not all gloomy doomsday mood because people are glued to the windows, run outside to taste snowflakes, scrape all snow together that they can get to build their first snowman etc. It’s a land in wonderment of snow – at least the North Island.

Snow in Wellington

Snow in Wellington

MyPortfolio: New features

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Over the last few months, a number of developers at Catalyst have been working on new features for Mahara. Version 1.4 was just released in mid-June and there is already a host of new features available. It’s amazing. As we were going to update MyPortfolio.school.nz for August 1, 2011, I decided to hand in a proposal for MoodleMoot NZ 2011 that focused on these new features as a number of Moodle users are also Mahara users. Mahara is well-known in New Zealand as MyPortfolio which now has over 700 schools registered.

The presentation focuses on the features that the Ministry of Education asked us to implement for MyPortfolio. The development work also goes back to Mahara itself. There are so many new features that I didn’t even include all, but left a couple out that are important for site admins.

This was my first MoodleMoot, and it was a good experience. I got to meet people that I knew from Twitter, webinars or had heard about in other contexts. It was great to learn more about how Moodle is used and what can be done with Moodle 2.

MyPortfolio: New features

The Mahara 1.4 Release Crew Mug

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Mahara 1.4 was released a little over 1 month ago. And now our Mahara 1.4 Release Crew mugs arrived in New Zealand. Contributors in the UK have already received them earlier, but ours took a bit longer to make the long journey from the CafePress workshop.

These mugs are a limited edition and are only presented to contributors to the open source ePortfolio system Mahara who worked on version 1.4.

I love the little Mahara guys that one of our designers at Catalyst IT created for the various jobs in the production of the software. And the construction site as theme is just perfect.
The most awesome mug - 2011-07-22

Tweets for student-generated tutorials

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Thank you for the great response about student-generated tutorials to my Twitter friends who took the time to send a reply.

The Shar-E-Fest 2011 took place at Wintec in Hamilton on July 11-12, 2011. That was also a chance to catch up with Heath Sawyer, one of the main MyPortfolio Taster Session facilitators in New Zealand. Just a few days ago he had posted questions in a MyPortfolio forum to prompt teachers and students to create supporting posters etc. for guides for the use of the ePortfolio system.

During a session we also came to think about student-generated resources for MyPortfolio, which is an ePortfolio that can be used by all schools in New Zealand and is based on Mahara. There is a user guide available, but as far as we knew no guides produced by students. I then asked on Twitter if MyPortfolio users knew about any such guides. Within a short time (and I apologize for blogging about this so late) I received responses not just from NZ, but the UK and Canada. My question was interpreted more widely in these responses and was taken as asking for any student-generated content and not specific for MyPortfolio.

First I thought: Darn, not quite what I wanted, but actually the responses were great because they led me to web sites of universities that have tutorials, guides and videos from students for students. I had a good time checking out Digital Tattoo and the Learning Commons from the University of British Columbia and some videos from the University of Prince Edward Island.

Digital Tattoo is a great site to which I’ll come back because e-responsibility and digital identity are discussed on MyPortfolio. The other sites give an idea of what students can achieve and how resources can be pulled together and presented.

So, thank you very much @psychemedia, @Bill_world, @sleslie, @phpnz, @brlamb, @UBCLearn for your responses!