A few of us spent part of last week in Brighton at MaharaUK 2014. Mahara – the environment UCL calls MyPortfolio – allows individuals and groups to create and connect multimedia-rich pages which they can selectively publish.  E-Learning Environments gave a couple of presentations with an emphasis on how Mahara can help with assessed group work. Mahara has really taken off at UCL in this area because it is student-facing, supported by ELE, accepts a huge range of embeds from the wider web, and enables the operational tasks (setting up groups, imposing deadlines, access for assessors, etc) which can be painful on external web services. Set out in this 2013 comparison of possible group work environments at UCL, these factors contributed to a decision on the part of the History department to choose Mahara for a compulsory Year 1 course, the subject of my co-authored presentation below (PDF available).

Domi Sinclair expanded on the different ways Mahara groups can be used for assessment.

My conference stand-outs included the University of Brighton’s Sue Greener explaining how she uses Mahara to supervise research students, and the University of Nottingham’s personal development initiative in biosciences (Judith Wayte, from 38.20 on the first recording). As somebody usually removed from software development, I got a lot out of attending the developers’ workshop with Aaron Wells and colleagues at Catalyst (one of the Mahara Partner companies contracted by different institutions at different times to make Mahara what it is). Being free and open source, Mahara depends on its users’ community-mindedness for ideas, help for users and software code; guidance on how to contribute is available on the Mahara wiki. I missed the presentation from Eric Rousselle from Discendum Oy, a Finnish Mahara Partner, about kyvyt.fi, a Finnish government-funded intiative to extend Mahara with integration of cloud platforms, an annotation tool, web meeting and a new interface – among other things. Also supporting group work, Nadia Spang Bovey and Patrick Roth talked about their work extending Mahara in a Swiss higher education context, including wizards for operating Mahara, and a range of ways (timeline, linked map, tag cloud) to navigate a portfolio. They have a prototype and a very short survey they’d like Mahara users to take, linked from their abstract.

As usual for a conference of tooled-up learning technology enthusiasts and galvanised by the conference game, there was an active back channel on Twitter – see Judith Wayte’s weave on Storify.