04 March 2010, 6:46

Appologies as I'm a bit new to Mahara -- I have an instance of Mahara installed and setup, what I want is for users to be able take one of their uploaded files, and submit it to a vew, and that view to be searchable...

For example several users have their own e-portfolios; in their portfolios they have a single document (e.g. a recepie) and I want to aggregate all those recepie articles on one public view (hopefully without having to duplicate the file in the file system) and make that view searchable by the author, the recepie title, keywords, or the institution of user...

 Is this possible with Mahara? 

04 March 2010, 14:29

Hello S,

Your suggestion sounds great. As far as I know, Mahara can't do that currently for a number of reasons.

Since Mahara 1.2 students can have a tag cloud / search for their individual portfolio. If you don't see it, your administrator needs to enable it. Likewise, he can disable the regular search which has not been working properly for many people. With the tag search enabled, students can locate all their artefacts, blog posts, views, files etc. when they tag them. However, there is no institution wide tag system or a group tag system in place as Richard implemented the individual tag cloud for the time being (was one of our feature requests :-) ).

If you want to make things public, they have to be made public by the students themselves. Otherwise, nobody can see the artefacts even if you manage to aggregate them somehow. Mahara allows for a very finely tuned rights management. Only things that are put into a view can potentially be seen by others. Who can eventually see what depends on who gets access to this view.

Cheers

Kristina

04 March 2010, 17:30

As Kristina said the tag clouds currently only work on individual views - even if they worked group wide it would be difficult to structure the tags.

For a group recipe view it would be better to create some stucture with a database that could be added to and searched by users.

 An example of this is the database module that is used in Moodle http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13 which allows adding , searching of records. 

There is some integration with Moodle and Mahara  already and accessing the Moodle database module from Mahara may be the way to get this functionality.

05 March 2010, 6:49

After chatting to a few others, I suspect there might be some development opportunity here. Effectively what I'm wanting is a view that can be set-up by some admin type person, which collates all artefacts of a particular type (defined at creation). 

 Once this is created, it uses the existing file as part of a digital repository that's available from a public view. From the user side, when they upload a file, they have an option to change the artefact_type to something like 'recipe', then set ACLs for it, some copyright/left information, and enter in details like; author, summery, etc. Those details become 'searchable' and form tag clouds and the like.

 Alternatively if Mahara can share or link to data in an open source digital repository...

07 March 2010, 10:31

Hi S,

It's definitely an interesting idea to easily aggregate content from different portfolios. When thinking about the development of this feature, please be aware that currently, all items that a student wants to have in their portfolio (and potentially show it to others) need to be placed in a view. It is not enough that the student uploads a file in their "My Files" space. In order for others to see it (publicly or also just internally), it needs to be placed in a view.

All the best

Kristina

08 March 2010, 14:10