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Pedagogy
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Blogging with Mahara
18 December 2008, 11:55
I know that Mahara is first and foremost designed as an eportfolio system but I'm interested to see how it might be used as a blogging system to gently ease teaching faculty at my college into the idea of eportfolio. Currently I operate a Moodle installation for Earlham college (v1.9) and I am also managing an Elgg 0.9 installation. The teachers using Elgg have been very happy with the blogging aspect and the tagging and access controls have been brilliant. But the developers have gone along a rather different track for version 1.0, there is currently no upgrade path and I am not sanguine about the future of the community. So I'm looking at Mahara as a potential upgrade path from Elgg.
With Mahara I like the emphasis on education -- read 'meaningful content' -- rather than social networking. I view the social networking aspect as a means to the end of encouraging discussions from students about their classes, homework, projects, community work, college clubs etc. I want to encourage students to break out of the silo of their major subject and engage in cross-pollinating conversations. This is where I see Mahara complement Moodle which is course oriented.
Links:
18 December 2008, 21:40
It would be interesting to hear about what features you liked about Elgg and how you think they could be applied to Mahara
23 December 2008, 16:23
Yes, Penny Leach suggested this also. I think I am going to do a detailed comparison of Elgg 09, Elgg 1.x, Mahara, and BuddyPress from the point of view of empowering a Social Learning Space. Slightly more details here.
23 December 2008, 18:23
You might want to compare Mahara 1.0 separately from 1.1 (or maybe just test 1.1) as groups have changed a lot in 1.1.
Looking forward to seeing the comparison 
16 June 2009, 10:41
Hi Mark,
Did you get any further with the comparison? I'd be really interested to hear your findings! I'm also looking at elgg 1.5, mahara, and buddypress.
Mike