Mahara 1.2 ePortfolios – Beginner’s Guide
This could almost be considered a second beginning 
– last post is already 10 month old. Well, I am not necessarily less busy now but I agreed to review a guide for Mahara 1.2 – and here I am giving it a go … Interestingly enough, I had to revisit Mahara over the past day’s anyway and therefore skim reading the guide was a useful refresher. There were also quite a few things I hadn’t been aware of or at least not in the context the book talked about it. Hence, a first conclusion – even though the title says “Mahara 1.2 ePortfolios – Beginner’s Guide”, chances are you find something new regardles of whether you are a beginner or not. Anyway, most people would acknowledge that there are many shades of gray between beginners, experts and masters – and according to Dreyfus, the latter wouldn’t even need a Guide.
The book is nicely structured, which means (for me) that the book cares about readers who have questions and cannot read a book from cover to cover to find the answer. Every chapter combines some prose (purpose of a given ePortfolio, benefits you can expect if you do x, y or z, etc) with some hands-on action. You could even do a quiz in each chapter – but then I am not a big quiz fan. However, it seems a good feature if you just skim read a chap and want to know whether you missed to understand an important concept.
Another useful thing is the way three different case studies are build up throughout the book. Each case study is used to look at Mahara from a different angle (school, corporate training, and vocational training). Personally, I was looking forward to learn more about the possibilities to drive assessment and I found an 11 step process on page 195 … The more important thing, however was an explanation on how to use course groups as a way by which learners can submit parts of their ePortfolio which can’t be changed until a tutor or lecturer has given his/her feedback and released it back to the student. In the end I believe it’s a highly recommendable book for beginners and one can only hope that there will be a similar guide for more advanced users of Mahara soon.
Disclosure: I got a free copy of this book to review but you could browse the book on Amazon ;)
