10 April 2009, 12:03

Glad to help. Hope it's of service. Comment if you like. I'm still working on it but it's almost there.

best,

Ricardo

10 April 2009, 14:10

Hi Ricardo, I logged onto your site and went through the tutorial. Nicely done!  When are you going to have the next tutorial up and running (how to load content into your view) and are you will to share the tutorials?

Kwantlen Polytechnic (my U.) is experimenting with Mahara but I think there are only two instructors who are trying it out. I would like to use it for my practicum students in the summer term in exactly the manner you are using it--3 views, "work in progress", "ready for assessment", and "for public display" so your tutorials are right on point for me! :)

11 April 2009, 18:12

Hello Doug,

Thanks for looking. There are a few more up now. tell me what you think. By all means, if it helps your instruction, feel free to borrow them.Just invite me to see. I'm curious to know how other people will use them.

best,

Ricardo

10 April 2009, 14:16

Hi Nigel, our U. is considering Mahara for its eportfolio system.  I am glad to see the work being done on an export capability.  One of the issues with our pilot that our institution hasn't figured out (yet) is what to do with alumni--once students graduate, do we allow them to keep using the system in their job search? How do we control content for non-students--that kind of thing.  If there is an export capability, students can port their views to a static web site (ok) or to another Mahara site, which would be great.

Cheers.

11 April 2009, 20:56

Well the import/export work will give you a lot of choice here, as you'll have both the static export option and the ability to port from one Mahara to another.

As for exactly where they go, well one option might be biobrio.com - the idea behind it is to be a general Mahara where anyone can have a portfolio, so school leavers could continue to use it past their time at school for example.

14 April 2009, 9:44

14 April 2009, 16:20

14 April 2009, 16:10

Hi Nigel -

You're already fairly familiar with LeaderTracker but I doubt others are. 

Our implementation, sponsored by GLISI (part of the public/state University System of Georgia) and the Wallace Foundation, is focused on in-field practicum for K-12 education leaders.  We've added the ability to create an artefact type called "path plan" which, technically, could be any professional or individual learning and growth plan.  GLISI sponsors a process by which universities, school districts, and the state professional standards commission can collaborate, negotiate, and contribute to the professional growth of existing leaders as well as selection and preparation of leadership candidates.

It's still a little early for us to make a "public case study" of using LeaderTracker as part of the process, but we are just now starting our first large scale pilot with a hundreds of users collaborating with 100 high profile leaders in Georgia.

Anyone interested can feel free to contact me about it.

~ Ray Merrill

14 April 2009, 16:48

Thanks Ray. Indeed, GLISI and yourself have worked with Mahara to make changes that suited your customisations - the group reworking - that have worked out great for everyone. If there was a textbook, I would say it was a textbook example of how to successfully collaborate with an open source project .

Ray contacted us with a plan of how he wanted to use Mahara, which was clearly going to involve some heavy customisation work on top of the current version at the time (1.0). But instead of ploughing ahead with customisations to 1.0 that may well have ended the possibility of upgrading to future versions, he let us spend a couple of days working out how to modify the Mahara core so he could just plug his changes in. We came up with a plan, which GLISI funded, and as a result everyone gained the benefits of an improved group system, which Ray has plugged his changes into.

This has given benefits to both sides - for example, we now maintain the new group system, which means Ray doesn't have to. He just has to maintain his plugins, and any other small customisations made, instead of maintaining a big set of patches against the core. And everyone benefits from the better groups system, which makes people more likely to adopt and use Mahara.

Ray is also a usability guru, and has graciously agreed to help us with our next usability sprint - changes which again will flow into the LeaderTracker project and reduce his maintenance requirements, while benefitting everyone in the community. Thanks, Ray!

17 April 2009, 6:29

Thats an interesting post! Sorry if this go's further off topic here... 

Regards usability / modifying Mahara we have hit a couple of issues with the resume. We would like to use that feature for staff development, as well as students, but we have a few issues.

First of all, we would like to create a template for a resume view that allowed staff to quickly create their view in a uniform / standard manner. Simply a one column view with all their resume info, including My Skills and My Goals. We have issues achieving this.

1. If you add "entire resume" My Goals and My Skills are not added.
2. If we create a template or a copyable view we are not able to add single resume fields (to pull in My Goals / My Skills). We get the block added, but it only allows the title to be set, we cannot select the actual fields. This looks like it may be a bug.

In terms of usability the relationship between the resume and My Goals / My Skills is not clear. They are on separate tabs in the portfolio, they are not dragged into the view with "entire resume", they have to be added one at a time by going to "single resume field" and selecting them. This is confusing.

Furthermore we would like additional fields at the bottom of the resume, things like "conferences attended" which are not currently present. How shoudl we go about adding these? I am wondering if it would be possible to add more fields like this into "standard Mahara" but have them disabled / enabled in the admin section? That way the resume section would become a lot more flexible for the differing needs of institutions... that would be preferable to hacking it up on our own . Perhaps another tab under Site Options called Resume Fields?

Jez