The book has just recently been published and is available in both print and e-book format, a characteristic of the Packt Publishing service. Needless to say my love of the electronic format and fascination with the Mahara software resulted in a day one purchase, something which I can recommend to anyone wishing to learn more about the open source e-portfolio solution. Mahara 1.2 E-Portfolio Beginners Guide is written by Richard William Hand, Derrin Michael Kent, Glenys Gillian Bradbury and Margaret Anne Kent – educational developers, Mahara learning designers and geeks one and all, which is evident as you read it’s pages. The book provides a step-by-step guide to building an impressive professional e-portfolio using Mahara. It covers the key features of Mahara that will help you set up your customised digital portfolio and display artifacts in your preferred way allowing contribution from selected users only.

It introduces the reader to the exciting features of Mahara framework and helps the reader develop a feature-rich e-portfolio. Sections deal with features such as how to create folders, upload multiple files like journals, project documents, pictures, and videos and share them with your friends. You will learn to set up views of these files,  choosing to make them visible to your chosen friends only or be shared with whatever people you desire. You will learn to create blogs and forums and get connected to the rest of the world. Customisation and administration of your Mahara site will become easy after you have gone through this book. Imagine how good you will feel when you will see your knowledge, success, and ideas going live and available to your chosen audiences for their inputs.

The pacing is just right with a logical progression followed from the opening chapter through the various aspects of Mahara configuration and usage. I have always found the Packt Publishing books to be informative and educational but I believe this titles along with some of their Moodle books raises the bar in terms of instructional content. Each page provides valuable knowledge and insight into the use of an application which fascinates me and furthermore provides an invaluable service to my students at absolutely no cost. Packt Publishing’s targeting of open source software provides a unique resource for those embracing the new media culture and indeed the emerging culture of e-learning. The provides knowledge for just about every aspect of Mahara installation and use, some of the key concepts learnt include:

•    Create folders in Mahara
•    Upload multiple files – journals, reports, presentations, videos, and sound clips – easily and set permissions for your group to view, edit, and delete them
•    Create a blog in Mahara
•    Make an impressive profile using Mahara profile fields and tailor your own profile view
•    Create a new web page entirely from scratch and customize it to allow much more flexibility and control over who sees what and when
•    Set an environment to receive public or private feedback on your pictures, videos, and articles
•    Connect with other Mahara users and get social: discuss topics of common interest in forums and share views with each other
•    Customize and administer your Mahara site to our own preferences using a number of configuration settings for easy administration

I believe this book to be an incredible resource for anyone working in education or developing learning solutions, particularly those interested or working in the field of e-learning. It assumes no prior knowledge and covers in clear and concise detail everything that an academic, student or developer needs to know about the Mahara platform. It has provided me with hours of informative and engaging reading and resulted in the implementation of my own Mahara resource.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Competition

The lovely people at Packt Publishing have kindly offered to provide blog readers with the opportunity to win a copy of of one of their e-publications. The competition offers the winners to select any title from the Packt range more than three months old. The competition is open from now until the 12th March with one winner selected on Friday 5th March and another on the 12th. Entrants need to leave a reply to this post stating how they would use Mahara in their work flow to  support and enhance the learning process. Packt Publishing offer a great range of titles so I’m sure that everyone will find something of interest. Good luck.

Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques by Susan Smith Nash and William Rice offers guidance on creative ways to utilise Moodle to support teaching and learning through the development of online courses. Moodle, for those unaware, is a powerful open source LMS or learning management system which provides a framework for the delivery of teaching and provision of assessment. It is used by many colleges and universities throughout the world supporting small classroom environments and whole universities. Moodle 1.9 Teaching Techniques provides step-by-step, easy-to-follow instructions and learning theory to give you tools and techniques to support learning within Moodle. It aims to provide educators with a clear and developed processes which can be used to communicate with students online, and aid teachers in developing an enthusiastic, open, and trusting relationship with their students and with their colleagues.

It is important to note that this book is not a how to guide for Moodle, Packt offers other titles which are more suited to that requirement, it is more a guide to developing good, solid, dynamic courses that will last by making sure that your instructional design is robust, and that courses are built around satisfying learning objectives and course outcomes. In saying that the book does an excellent job of informing the reader of some of Moodle’s key features and provides suggestions as to how these might be utilised. The core objective of the book is to provide educators with insight into the development process allowing them to produce dynamic and engaging content for their students. The following should be possible upon completion:

• Build a learning outcome-focused approach that enables your students to perform well
• Different techniques for creating a dynamic learning environment
• Put all the ideas you’ve wanted to implement, but never could, into action to create unique courses with reusable elements
• Motivate your students to collaborate and demonstrate what they are learning and to create projects together
• Develop materials you can re-use in your future courses
• Incorporate Web 2.0 features to encourage student sharing of resources
• Create online workshops and galleries for your students to make presentations about what they have learned
• Build e-portfolios for students to collect their work and demonstrate mastery of the units
• Engage your students in team work that helps them connect course content with their experiences and prior learning
• Feel confident in finding ways to accommodate your students’ learning styles and preferences to guide them to a successful outcome for the course
• Develop high-quality courses that will last and stay useful and relevant to create a personal inventory you can use and re-use

I have been using Moodle extensively for a number of years yet still found value and worth within these pages, at times I was a little frustrated that the techniques were not explored or showcased as explicitly as I would have liked but overall I found reading to be informative and worthwhile. Knowing how to use Moodle is one thing but knowing how to develop learning materials and construct a sound learning environment is another. This book provides knowledge on how to do both.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

I have talked a little about Moodle in the past and will do so again in the very near future on the blog but I would like to focus this post on Mahara. It is perhaps a little less well known but nonetheless an invaluable tool in supporting 21st century learning. Mahara is an open source e-portfolio platform and can be best understood by exploration of the concept of an e-portfolio.

E-Portfolios

An electronic portfolio or ePortfolio is a generic term encompassing as wide a range of types and products as there are reasons for using them. The simplest starting point is to consider an ePortfolio as an extension of the paper based-portfolio, bringing with it the obvious benefit of making a portfolio of evidence portable and shareable anywhere that you have Internet access – “the new generation of the three ring binder” JISC My World Project Final Report, Roberts. 2006

While there are resources available, particularly on the Internet, these are often fragmented and vastly distributed making them difficult to utilise in a process of learning. Thankfully things got a lot easier about four years ago with the introduction of Imagine Fx into the UK market, finally a monthly publication that provided content relating to digital art production. Imagine Fx provides workshops, gallerys, interviews, tutorials, artist Q&A’s all wonderfully packaged in a monthly print publication. Each month the magazine focuses on a particular core topic which it explores in detail highlighting some core principles and techniques relevant to the area, as well as featuring segments with artists who specialise in that area. In addition each month there are hardware and software reviews, a news section focusing on the world of digital art and a section which showcases the work of the publications readers. If that wasn’t enough each issue is accompanied by a companion DVD which provides software trials, video screencast tutorials, assets and files relating to magazine tutorials.

It really is a fantastic package and one I consider essential reading for all my students. The content lends itself well to many of the subject areas that I teach in and the fact that content is geared towards fantasy and sci-fi art goes down well with both the students and myself. This month’s issue, cover preview picture below, focuses on pin-up art, an area I personally have a lot of admiration and enthusiasm for and features contributions from Adam Hughes, Hajime Sorayama and Serge Birault. Fascinating details are often unearthed in feature segments and this month the inspiration behind Adam Hughes Catwoman covers is revealed, as a fan of comic books and owner of those actual covers it is both insightful & informative. A myriad of techniques and tips are explored and documented while a feature article by Mike McCain discusses the issue of artist’s block.

I find Imagine Fx invaluable as an educational tool and make use of it on a monthly basis to support my teaching, furthermore I find it’s pages a place where I can spend recreational time with ease. If you are interested in fantasy and sci-fi art or digital art techniques in general you really should be subscribing right now.

Check out a video preview of this month’s edition below!!