Following the Mahara conference, I took a fortnight's leave (in England, no rain during the entire time), so this report is delayed.
Here are a few observations taken from my little notebook (one with real paper).
Badges seem to be the upcoming theme, as Mozilla have their Open Badges project and badges are available in Moodle 2.5.
I listened to Meredith Henson's instructive session about badges on Friday with great interest.
Kristina Höppner also mentioned that they were introducing different Mahara badges for different members of the community.
Simon Grant's keynote also mentioned badges. Using e-portfolio you can "not just claim what you can do, you can evidence it" "But there's no standardisation" [of a competencies system] (SG is working on a LOC standard for representing frameworks). If definitions and standards were available, "the reader of an e-portfolio could see exactly what that person is claiming"… "I do think that open badges play a part in this". SG explained that badges are for individuals to show their competencies and …"inloc… is a framework for setting out the competencies". SG concluded that big industries don't want standardisation because they want to produce their own. However, if smaller companies can get together and use a standard then that may be the way forward. SG referred us to www.ecompetences.eu
Another issue that arose was the advantage of single signon and integration of Moodle with Mahara. I attended sessions where, not having the integration, they were doing a workaround. In one case, the proposed solution was achieved by following a complicated set of instructions.
A discussion about the usability of Mahara used my Mahara Student Guide as an example. The presenter had gone to the trouble of counting the number of speech bubbles.
(Although my guide is a step by step one, not all of the options are included and some of those that were are obvious, for example, creating a new page. The difficult ones, like dragging a content block onto a page, are not the easiest ones to portray in print alone.)
I learnt that in Mahara 1.6 it is possible to submit a collection to an assignment and to use mobile browsing and upload items from mobile devices. Also you can configure a site to use human-readable URLs (clean URLs). (This is a huge improvement on the illegible secret URLs that are currently generated.)
About badges - my two pennyworth: I think there is some scepticism that has been reported in the past. However, I appreciate being recognised for good work that I have done and badges would also reflect a way of being recognised. If there's a clear and fair way for people to receive such recognition and that it's valuable to their professional community then I'm all for it. In particular, I see that it might be useful within the digital literacy context where there could be some automated verification of achievement. Of course there may be students who see this as inappropriate but don’t we all have different ways of learning? And what’s a degree but a big badge?
I was given the opportunity to display my Mahara video during the short presentations/pechakucha session. Here it is: What Mahara is and how it can help you
And finally –
I liked the many chance encounters that I had with colleagues old and former. And some people whom I had met at previous conferences and workshops. Sorry if I haven't mentioned your name. My Mahara helpfulness badge goes to Andrew Nicols who spoke of many things both Mahara and Moodle. I’m looking forward to using Moodle 2.5 with its new icons.
Thank you for the Jandals which I display on my desk...
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| Mahara Jandals |
