Book Image

Mahara ePortfolios: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Mahara ePortfolios: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Mahara ePortfolios helps you to use software as you follow an experiential learning cycle. In Mahara you can: Plan your learning. Do what you do and gather evidence of your competence as you do those things. View and organize your work by structuring your data in easy-to-make (web)pages and (mini-website) collections of those pages. Reflect on your learning by use of professional journals, engaging feedback on your pages and establishing and engaging in online communities who share a similar interest. Mahara ePortfolios: Beginner's Guide is a step-by-step guide to develop a feature-rich and highly personal electronic portfolio. Form a digital repository of reflective journals, action learning plans, presentations, reports, images and videos. Easily share this with your friends, family, tutors, students, project team and others using this step-by-step guide written in a clear and easy to learn manner.This book guides you to build an impressive e-Portfolio and to work in professional communities of interest within a Mahara walled garden. It brings to life the key features of Mahara which will help thoughtful people to display their artefacts coherently and to engage with like-minded peers professionally.This book introduces you to exciting features of Mahara framework and helps you develop a feature-rich e-portfolio for yourself. You will see how easily you can create folders, upload multiple files like project documents, pictures and videos and share them with your friends. You will learn to set up single pages and collections of pages which organize these files, making these visible only to your own chosen peers, supervisors or friends. Then, you will allow people to give their inputs.You will learn to create journals, learning plans, your professional resume, group spaces and forums which help you get connected to the rest of the world. Customization and administration of your Mahara site will be 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.Mahara ePortfolios: Beginner's Guide is a 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.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Mahara ePortfolios Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Time for action — setting up the data directory


Let's see how easy it is to set up your data directory:

  1. 1. Make the data directory outside of the public folder of your home directory. Create the directory using the mkdir command and call it uploaddir:

    mkdir uploaddir
    
    

    Note

    It doesn't really matter what you decide to call your dataroot directory, but try and choose a name that is relevant to what the directory is doing. The name suggested by Mahara and most commonly used is uploaddir, but other names such as maharadata would be just as good.

  2. 2. Set the permissions on this folder, using the chmod command:

    chmod -R 0777 uploaddir
    
    
  3. 3. Change the user of the new directory to be the same as your server, using the chown command. The user is usually apache or www-data:

    chown -R www-data:www-data uploaddir
    
    
  4. 4. And that's all there is to it, you now have a place where Mahara can put all of the stuff belonging to your users.

What just happened?

You just created your data directory and made sure that it was in a safe place in your home directory outside of the htdocs directory. Then you changed the permissions, users, and groups for the directory to make it easy for Mahara to put things in and to delete things.

Let's take a quick look at the file structure that you have just created for your Mahara installation:

So far, you have downloaded and put the Mahara files into place on your server, and seen how to create the database and dataroot needed to store all the Mahara information.