Book Image

Mahara 1.2 E-Portfolios: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Mahara 1.2 E-Portfolios: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Mahara is a user-centred environment with a permissions framework that enables different views of an e-portfolio to be easily managed. These views helps you display your artefacts – text files, spreadsheets, images, and videos – in a way you choose and to the people you want. You can also create online communities and social networks through groups, blogs, and forums.Being a novice, you will need a quick and easy implementation guide to set up your feature-rich digital portfolio.This book is your step-by-step guide to building an impressive professional e-portfolio using Mahara. It covers the key features of Mahara that will help you set up your customized digital portfolio and display the artefacts in your preferred way allowing contribution from selected users only.This book will introduce to the exciting features of Mahara framework and help you develop a feature-rich e-portfolio for yourself. You will see how easily you can create folders, upload multiple files like journals, project documents, pictures, and videos and share them with your friends. You will learn to set up views of these files, making these visible to your chosen friends only. And then, you will allow people to give their inputs.You will learn to create blogs and forums and get connected to the rest of the world. Customization and administration of your Mahara site will become easy after you have gone through this book. Imagine how good you will feel when you will see your knowledge, success, and ideas going live and available to your chosen audiences for their inputs.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Mahara 1.2 ePortfolios
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

The exciting bit: Forum topics


Now that we have our forum in place, it's time to start adding the questions and comments that will make it into a lively social discussion area. To do this, we first need to start using topics.

Topics are issues (or topics) that people want to discuss. A forum that works, remember, will usually be one where the group members have an extrinsic necessity (for example, part of their job role) or an intrinsic desire to engage with it (useful information to gain, important decisions to be made, fun and laughter to be had).

Forum discussion frameworks

A forum can be made up of many different topics with wide ranging issues. The best discussions frameworks are those that lead to some sort of "outcome" or conclusion. Some generically useful discussion frameworks include:

  • Comparing: For example, "What are the similarities and differences between food we eat today and food they ate in Tudor England?"

  • Detecting differences: For example, "What different reactions are there...