I prepared these slides for a three minute micro-talk I gave about Mahara, an open-source ePortfolio for education. As the technical lead on Mahara for Catalyst IT, I often find myself having to explain to people exactly what Mahara is, what an ePortfolio is, and how you use one in education. This is my attempt to give a very brief answer to all those questions, for a semi-technical audience. When being read aloud, "&$%#" is pronounced "heck". (Depending on the audience.) ;)

1. Mahara:
What the &$%# is it?
Presented by Aaron Wells, Catalyst IT // 26th March 2015
Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0

2. About Catalyst

3. Aaron Wells (Me)
@AaronTheMad
Mahara (My job)
@MaharaProject

4. Mahara: What the &$%# is it?

5. Mahara: the facts
●
An open-source ePortfolio for education
●
Born in NZ in 2006, for a consortium of NZ universities
●
Catalyst Mahara team is “Mahara HQ”
– Releases security updates
– Maintains most project infrastructure
●
Significant code contributions from a global open source community
– Translated by the community into 30 languages
●
300 sites worldwide that volunteer usage data back to mahara.org
– With over 1 million users between them
.school.nz

6. What the &$%# is an ePortfolio?
“Mahara is a fully featured web application to build your electronic portfolio. You can
create journals, upload files, embed social media resources from the web and collaborate
with other users in groups.”

7. My definition
ePortfolio: (noun) A multi-user content management system.

9. Mahara's features in outline
●
Users create “Pages”, i.e. webpages
●
Managing, and creating the content that goes in those webpages
– Images
– Text
– Videos
– Blogs
– Etc...
●
Pages can be grouped into “Collections”, i.e. mini-websites
●
Social network functionality to let users collaborate and share
content

10. What the &$%# is it good for?
The ePortfolio replaces the “snail-portfolio”
https://www.flickr.com/photos/madame_furie/2467902183

11. Your gateway to the magical world of getting
involved with Mahara:
The Mahara community website:
https://mahara.org

12. Catalyst Clients

13. Open Source Technologies