29 February 2016, 22:24

Hello

Am getting a little confused about similarities between Mahara and some other PLEs I've seen. Please help clarify.

As I read and seen demonstrated elsewhere, a PLE is a customizable page ( like iGoogle) in which you place the widgets/gadgets you think best suit your learning needs. IAdd feeds of your choice. Inputs come from your selected feeds and your learning. All this goes to yoour database which can then be showcased as you wish.

If this about a typical PLE is correct, then my question.

Is Mahara the same as above, OR  just  a way to document your learnings yourself and the showcase as you wish. Are there such widgets/gadgets etc in Mahara too? ( I didn't find them in my first exploration, but I could be wrong)

My question itself may not be too clear -- and that is my problem!

I work with Moodle for a long time and also have recently installed Mahara. I am a trainer  on creativity and leadership and my interest is to use Mahara for my learners IF that offers them some value add over what they've already learnt from me in Moodle.

Thanks

Alok

03 March 2016, 8:09

Hello Alok,

Thank you for your questions. I'll try to clarify. :-)

Mahara was built on the idea of a PLE but not entire in the sense that you described with services like iGoogle and Pageflakes etc. The latter - if I remember correctly - only allowed you to pull in feeds from other online resources, but didn't allow you much creation of content.

Instead in Mahara you can interact with content from online resources (embed them via an iframe or RSS feed) as well as learning evidence you have stored on your computer and want to put online but can't use any of the other services to do so.

There is overlap with other online services, e.g. you can create a journal / blog, you can upload videos and display them directly on a page, you can upload images, you can participate in online discussions and collaborate on projects. You'll see a fair amount of overlap with Moodle around these functionalities.

Where Mahara differs to Moodle and iGoogle for example is that you can decide flexibly with whom you want to share your content of particular pages or collections of pages. You can create portfolios both for course assessment (and have them assessed in Moodle) and also for personal PD or extracurricular activities and the latter doesn't require instructor approval like it would in Moodle if you wanted to have a new course set up.

In Mahara, the term PLE is understood more widely: You can create a landing page from where you go off to other places, but might lack some of the widgetry, and you can curate your own content that you can upload and make available to the people in your network either entirely or selectively. You can find some examples of different use of ePortfolios in my recent presentation at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBqvqfyOHEA (links are clickable in the presentation slides that are linked in the description) or in the YouTube channel where we collect presentations from Mahara events: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi9FhXKEZjFs1D6FPhg-SCQ

Cheers

Kristina

03 March 2016, 21:06

Thanks, Christina. You've been most helpful.

Am trying to build up my Learning Space in Mahara, so that is of great use to my Moodle learners. If anyone can provide more help in this, I shall be grateful.

Alok