Friday, May 09, 2008

myPortfolios presentation

Attended a presentation and workshop by Andy Kirk (from the flexible learning network) on myPortfolios today. Myporfolios tertiary is based on the open source Mahara software. Mahara was developed via funding from the NZ Tertiary Education Commission's e-learning Collaborative Development Fund (eCDF), involving Massey University, Auckland University of Technology, The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, and Victoria University of Wellington.

A good range of participants with about ½ from CPIT, TANZ & the secondary, primary and early childhood sectors. Andy went through a good overview including revealing the underlying pedagogical philosophy of myPortfolio as being Kolb’s learning cycle. myPortfolio accepts evidence / artefacts in the form of text and multimedia files and is linkable to blogs, flickr, youtube, rss feeds and social networking sites. Views can be customised for different ‘markets’ that the ePortfolio compiler requires. These views are made up of the artefacts that have been previously collected or linked to. Groups of users can also be networked via myPortfolio.

We all had a chance to have a good play with myPortfolio. In general, processes were intuitive although some of the page names would require tutorials with some students who are unfamiliar with how to upload material on to web based sites. myPortfolio was also visually pleasing to look at. View pages were well laid out and it was easy to move things around so that items were well organised and presented on the viewing pages.

No comments: