I attended MaharaUK11 yesterday and tweeted quite prolifically so am now attempting to collate these into a blog. I am a relative newcomer to e-portfolios and have no strong commitment either way but one thing was clear yesterday - Mahara is alive and well in a variety of educational contexts so the views of Martin Weller and Donald Taylor and others on the demise of e-portfolios are not the whole story.
Back to the tweet narrative:
The New Zealand Connection
Mahara (Maori word for thinking) originated in New Zealand and still has strong influences from there. Most of key developers, some of whom were at the conference, are from NZ. The opening keynote was by Mark Osborne a secondary school teacher in NZ http://prezi.com/dubgzzefzioj/maharauk-open-for-learning/ who is using Mahara extensively with his students for individual and group work. He also uses it himself for CPD – something that several of the other presenters also highlighted.
Mahara and Moodle
Most schools/colleges/universities in the UK are using Mahara with Moodle though some, like us, are using a standalone version for smallscale projects. At some institutions the use of Mahara for communications and collaborative activity seems to be taking over from equivalent VLE tools. Phil Butler from ULCC (host Moodle/Mahara for many FE/HEIs) has stats to support. His presentation will appear in due course on the MaharaUK11 site.
Case studies of note
Nottingham university used Mahara with Bioscience students on summer placement. It helped coordinate communications between staff and students which has been difficult and inefficient in the past. It also helped students keep in touch with each other and provide support to those who were struggling etc. Employers also got engaged in the process.
University of Kent piloted Mahara this academic year after using Pebblepad for 3 years on limited basis. One consideration was cost. They are moving towards full implementation within Moodle from 2011/12. As well as using it with current students, they also plan to use it to develop alumni engagement.
Southampton Solent (SSU) have been using Mahara for a couple of years and are a bit of a leader in the field in my view. Media students have started using Mahara for showcasing their work – previously they had to learn Dreamweaver. We were shown some very impressive CVs by students in journalism and other media related subjects.
Lifelong learning Don Presant who represents a Manitoban community career development network makes great use of Mahara. See link: http://careerportfolio.mb.ca for examples of use. See also a .pdf of his presentation on proceedings site http://maharauk.org/mod/resource/view.php?id=76
Don also drew attention to e-folio Minnesota http://www.efoliominnesota.com/ and Careers Wales http://www.careerswales.com/ as great examples of life long learning networks which offer the general public an e-portfolio for life (not sure what platform they’re based on). Careers Wales has 400,000 users apparently.
A range of plugins were demonstrated by Geoffrey Rowland from Yeovil College e.g. CPD to enable staff to record time spent on courses et al. FE staff are required to formally document 30 hours of CPD per year so this is very useful in that context but no doubt could apply elsewhere. He also demo’d chemistry teaching and mind mapping tools (will add links when/if I find them).
Conclusion
It was a useful day even if it poses more questions than answers for me, the most pressing being ‘Where do we go from here?’ I won’t begin to bore the blogosphere with our internal dilemmas.
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