Well, until now, I have been talking about OpenSyllabus, their benefits and their objectives, ideas about how me and my partners could integrate it into moodle, how can we use and interpret the XML file that it generates, etc.
I recived a call from Marc telling me that the important question about OpenSyllabus is the idea behind it, not the technology behind it. Also, he told me about Mahara Portfolio, and that he is also interested on it. I should think about how we can integrate into Moodle Mahara Portfolio and OpenSyllabus.
Mahara is a CMS Project developed by Catalyst IT, a brother project of Moodle (they have between them some collaborations). It objective is similar to Moodle and Sakai, create social learning networks and share resources between members (The typical web 2.0). It has a interesting tool, called Portfolio. I will explain it in detail immediately.
Yesterday I invested the whole afternoon in install on my PC Mahara (I followed the guide in the oficial webpage, but it was quite difficult) and make working OpenSyllabus into Eclipse (omg, 3 hours for making it working good!). Regardless, now I have a full working mahara and OpenSyllabus on my PC and I can take a look to code when I want.
After that, I could explore what is Mahara, and what is Portfolio. And O-M-G! It seems to be a nice CMS and Portfolio a nice tool! (I say seems because I have only tested it one day, however I can see interesting uses for myself :D). You know what is a portfolio, right? The typical folder where you store your drafts, currículums, learning resources... Well, Mahara implements something similar:
- First, it has a complete and interesting user profile (where you can put your personal information, like other CMS systems). Nevertheless, it's different in Mahara. In your profile you can define your own Curriculum Vitae (Certifications, books and publications, education history, employment history), your academic/career goals, and what are your skills. Moodle doesn't have an user profile as great as Mahara.
- Portfolio allow users to upload files (their notes, pdfs, even source code) in a structured way (in folders). Also it allows creating view pages for every user (blogs, etc...). However, it's bugged for now.
So, Mahara Portfolio is a good tool to allow students having their own Curriculums and notes in a structured and organized way.
Now, How can we integrate Mahara and OpenSyllabus into Moodle once we know what are their advantatges and disadvantatges? I've got some ideas. I write one of them:
- Modify the Moodle user profile to make it equal to Mahara user profile and Portfolio. With a good user profile, users and students would be engaged in organizing their notes and their curriculums, sharing them among other students. This will improve their learning experience and their learning performance.
- Add/embed OpenSyllabus to Moodle for creating easy and uniform syllabi, and allow teachers to create courses in a very easy way. This would improve the organization of courses and their upgrading.
Well, in 21th I'm talking with Marc and Pigui about all of these.
Hey, I'm really enjoying this project! :D
PD: I attach two screens about Mahara profile and portfolio.
