Mullett's Corner

Julian Walker Well, as my first dive into facilitating an online course that I created goes, I don't think it went too badly at all :D 30 Students signed up to my 'e-Portfolios for the reflective learner' course which ran in our Mahara system. 13 of which ended up completing the course and submitting a brilliant array of portfolios to the course group. The course it self was split into the following areas or pages: Introduction Task 1 - Introduction to reflective learning Task 2 - Reflect on VARK results Task 3 - Identify on a subject of your choice and reflect on it Task 4 - Create a plan Task 5 - Create an e-portfolio page Task 6 - Reflect on using Mahara - Submission Where next? You can get the gist of the course structure above, pulling the students into the course with the why's and selling of e-portfolios and reflective practice in general before light touch tasks getting the students to actually try out these tools. At the end of the course, ...

AJ Cann - http://flic.kr/p/7nMoyC Just finished the first of our student inductions for 2013/2014, It wasn't the biggest one we've had, four students to be precise. However our new reworked structure seemed to go down well. The slides have been tidied up and we more clearer define the differences between the intranet/VLE/e-portfolio. We have also started emphasising the importantance of reflective journaling and the use of e-portfolios, promoting our institution provided Mahara installation. When given the usual choice of what the presenter should focus on next our friend Twitter reigned supreme again with a joint 2nd going to Diigo and Goodle Drive. After going through the motions I asked the students a new question we have in there, asking if they will take any further action or investigate what we have talked about.  100% Yes was the answer from the students, which is nice to see. Still a bit of tweaking to do and maybe throw in some more interactive clicker qu...

Rae Allen -  http://flic.kr/p/3hDGbd I'm currently stuck, stuck in the middle of pushing an eportfolio system into the institution as a service and holding back because the infrastructure isn't there. Currently our portfolio system, Mahara isn't hooked up to the rest of our institutions authentication system. Students who use the system have to use a completely different password than what they use for email, intranet, vle etc.. This is, for me, a major barrier for convincing students to use Mahara. Don't get me wrong, I want students to use the system, but what I don't want is for students to 'attempt' to use the system, fail, walk away never touching it again.  Mahara does support its own password recovery tools but when does anyone ever ready the information presented after a failed login attempt? There's an opinion floating around that everyone walking through the doors are IT wiz's and unfortunately this vision is far from the tru...

Vanguard Visions -  http://flic.kr/p/edthjg I've slacked in the whole blog updating process, my bad.. Well after an incredibly early start and getting stuck on the M25 for hours I made it to the Mahara UK2011 conference hosted at Southampton Solent. I managed to get there for the start of Philip Butler's session "E-Portfolios: Expanding in a Shrinking Landscape", as a side note I'll mention that I was also having a bash at using the cross platform note taking app Evernote. My colleague Aaron Burrell (@iaaronburrell) had mentioned it before but I was in one of those "Ugh, not another thing to register for" moments. However, I have an iPad for a reason right?! Philips session was a great insight into what ULCC had been up to and their input into Mahara being one of the first partners to get involved with the project. He demonstrated the transition of web technologies from past (Phil mentioned Web1) compared to latest Web2 (A term coined in 2004,...