http://dablog.ulcc.ac.uk/2008/12/17/lifes-a-gas-at-moodle-wonderland/
I was pleased to be invited to join the ULCC e-Learning team at the Moodle Wonderland event in Camden. The event is mainly focused on users of the Moodle VLE in Further Education Colleges, and there is a lively buzz about the event, thanks in no small part to the stand-up MC skills of ULCC’s ace Senior e-Learning Adviser, Phil Butler. As well as the Moodle and Mahara workshops, highlights included: a very thorough setting of the personal learning context by John Gray; a description of ULCC’s personalisation projects by James Ballard; Mick Kahn’s history of ULCC’s illustrious pedigree from supercomputing to digital preservation and e-learning services (including a plug for NDAD and ourselves, thanks Mick!); and Don Christie’s history of Mahara, launching its official partnership with ULCC.
I was asked to assist James with a demonstration of the Mahara e-Portfolio system. ULCC has been working extensively on personalisation tools for e-Learning, at the heart of which is developing the Personal Learning Plan modules for Moodle, and integrating it with Mahara.
I’ve been very impressed with Mahara since I started dabbling with it on the demo server set up by James Ballard of our Moodle team. Unlike some other e-Portfolio systems I’ve seen, it is intuitive, powerful and fun, and focuses on the task in hand of preparing and managing portfolios. Mahara e-Portfolios can incude not only static information from within Mahara and Moodle, but also external content and dynamic information from external RSS feeds, YouTube, and the like: it’s a very likeable Web Two-ish application that has lots of potential uses, from school and college projects to all manner of personal portfolio projects, such as CPD and Professional Accreditations.
Preservation and interoperability issues abound here too. ULCC’s e-Learning team is working with JISC CETIS on modules to transfer files and assignments from Moodle and Mahara, and ways of packaging up interoperable portfolio packages, in a SCORM/IMS kind of approach, for between Mahara and Pebblepad. Longer-term preservation however does not seem to feature in any discussions I’ve heard: should we be thinking about using repositories to manage and preserve portfolios (or snapshots of portfolios) over the long term, whether for compliance or historical interest? Could this be another job for JISC-PoWR?
5 Comments
Interesting to hear about your work on Mahara. It’s something we’ve been meaning to set up and look at and I’m impressed with your demo site, Richard.
By the way, we’re using SNEEP on our IR now. Needs a few tweaks, but is pretty much there. http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/1543/ Thanks for all your work on developing the plugins!
Wow, Joss, that looks sneeping sweet, you’ve made our day (and they said we were mad!!!) We’ll have a word with Seb sometime, see if there’s any code to feed back into the main trunk.
Mahara’s cool, it really is. The e-Learning/Moodle guys know the full details, all I know is, I like it (and I’m fussy about my web apps!)
A little bit of clarification – the interoperability work is actually part of a wider project to develop a portfolio interoperability standard in consultation with several other portfolio products, not just Mahara and Pebblepad. JISC CETIS is co-ordinating.
Thanks for the update, Nigel – look forward to finding out more about it in the New Year.
Thanks for the workshop support. Seemed to go very well.
To add to Nigel’s point, details of the interoperability stuff can be found on the CETIS Wiki: http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Portfolio_interoperability_projects
The project is to test the LEAP2A specification as a standard for portfolio interoperability: http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/LEAP2A_specification