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

Writing in your journal


Have you ever kept a handwritten diary or created a blog? In this section, you are going to learn how to do something similar by creating a journal in Mahara and by writing journal entries. You are not going to publish these journal entries yet, that will come later.

What is a journal in Mahara?

In the past, the journals in Mahara were referred to as blogs, which I am sure many of you are familiar with as a term. It seemed like a good match given that blogs are widely considered to be a form of online diary.

In fact, the word blog derives from the combined words web and log , for example:

web + log = weblog

Think of a log as in:

"Captain's Log, Stardate 43198.7. The Enterprise remains in standard orbit ....".

Whilst this is essentially exactly what the Mahara journal feature is — an online log of your thoughts over time, the term blog has also come to be associated with self-promotion, marketing, and communication.

The term journal fits much better within the world of...