MyPortfolio: New features take 2

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At the end of July I gave a presentation at MoodleMoot NZ about the new features for MyPortfolio. As there were so many we knew that we could not finish them all for the August 1, 2011, release. On Wednesday, we released the last lot of them along with a number of bug fixes. A few highlights of the new features (taken from my release notes):

  • group types: They are now more flexible and you can have more settings when you create a group. If you have the staff role, you will see more options than a user with the default rights.
  • text box: Now mainly called “Notes”. They are re-usable across pages and can have comments like other artefacts. Your existing text boxes have been converted into notes and reside under Content -> Notes. You can create new notes from a page and they get added to the re-usable ones. You can edit your notes from the Notes page as well and every instance of the note will be changed (similar to how journal posts work). You can also include notes created in groups to which you have access and make a copy of them.
  • changes to the profile and how it is handled: You can share your profile now only with your institution. Basic information like display name, institution membership, send a message is still visible to everybody. But you can keep the rest to your institution and other people only. Your profile page now shows up as page under the Share Tab (due to a bug that couldn’t yet be fixed it is called “Profile view”). “Logged-in users” still appear in the access list, but you can take them off. You can now also share other pages with your entire institution.
  • multiple file upload: When you click on the “Browse” button for uploading files, you can now select more than one file to upload at once.

A new member of the Mahara community had tested the fullscreen mode in the current TinyMCE and found that it works. Thus, a long open bug could be closed and users on MyPortfolio can now also increase the editor window easily.

If you are a Mahara user, you can test these features yourself. They are all part of the future Mahara 1.5 release. The wiki tells you how to set up your developer environment and get the code for your experiments.

These features have all been made possible thanks to funding from the NZ Ministry of Education and in there the Managed Learning Environment Project Group (now part of the Sector Access and Interoperability team) around Paul Seiler.

Let’s see how the close to 40,000 users from over 810 schools in NZ like these new features. Yes, that’s over 110 new schools since the end of July. :-)

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