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Create and host educational and professional e-portfolios and personalized learning communities Create, customize, and maintain an impressive personal digital portfolio with a simple point-and-click interface Set customized access to share your text files, images, and videos with your family, friends, and others Create online learning communities and social networks through groups, blogs, and forums A step-by-step approach that takes you through examples with ample screenshots and clear explanations Mahara is a user-centred environment with a permissions framework that enables different views of an e-portfolio to be easily managed. These views helps you display your artefacts - text files, spreadsheets, images, and videos - in a way you choose and to the people you want. You can also create online communities and social networks through groups, blogs, and forums. Being a novice, you will need a quick and easy implementation guide to set up your feature-rich digital portfolio. This book is your step-by-step guide to building an impressive professional e-portfolio using Mahara. It covers the key features of Mahara that will help you set up your customized digital portfolio and display the artefacts in your preferred way allowing contribution from selected users only. This book will introduce to the exciting features of Mahara framework and help you develop a feature-rich e-portfolio for yourself. You will see how easily you can create folders, upload multiple files like journals, project documents, pictures, and videos and share them with your friends. You will learn to set up views of these files, making these visible to your chosen friends only. And then, you will allow people to give their inputs. You will learn to create blogs and forums and get connected to the rest of the world. Customization and administration of your Mahara site will become easy after you have gone through this book. Imagine how good you will feel when you will see your knowledge, success, and ideas going live and available to your chosen audiences for their inputs. What you will learn from this book You will learn to: Create folders in Mahara - just like on your own computer - with an easy file search facility Upload multiple files - journals, reports, presentations, videos, and sound clips - easily and set permissions for your group to view, edit, and delete them Create a blog in Mahara and get connected to the rest of the world Make an impressive profile using Mahara profile fields and tailor your own profile view Create a new web page entirely from scratch and customize it to allow much more flexibility and control over who sees what and when Set an environment to receive public or private feedback on your pictures, videos, and articles Connect with other Mahara users and get social: discuss topics of common interest in forums and share views with each other Customize and administer your Mahara site to our own preferences using a number of configuration settings for easy administration Approach This book will provide you with step-by-step instructions to get started with Mahara and create an impressive electronic portfolio. The book is packed with many useful examples and screenshots for easy and quick learning. Who this book is written for Pick this book up if you want to get started with Mahara. This book is for you if: You are a student/learner wanting to maintain online documentation of your projects and share it with a particular teacher/trainer for feedback You are a teacher wanting to set up an e-portfolio for your students in order to encourage and advance personalized and reflective learning You are a professional wanting to share your journals and project documents with your team by sharing your existing knowledge and creating new knowledge in communities of professional practice No previous experience of Mahara is required. About the Author Derrin Michael Kent describes himself as a cross between a trainer, a manager, a linguist, and a geek. Managing Director of TDM (tdm.info), Derrin has a Master's level teaching qualification from the University of Cambridge (DTEFLA) and is also a Linux-Certified professional (LPIC). A jack-of-all-trades in open source software, Derrin has extensive Moodle experience (already a reviewer of two Packt books on Moodle) and speaks both Spanish and English at home with his Peruvian wife and two bilingual children. Glenys Gillian Bradbury is a Prince2-qualified Project Manager who also works as a Mahara (and Moodle) learning-designer, site-administrator and end-user trainer for TDM (tdm.info). Glenys has extensive working experience as a trainer and manager in both educational and business environments. She is a friendly and sensitive change-manager who really, really knows how to make a personal development planning/knowledge management implementation process come to life. Margaret Anne Kent has worked continuously as a corporate manager and director in a variety of Work-Based Learning contexts since the late 1980s. She is now a Mahara (and Moodle) learning-designer and end-user trainer for TDM (tdm.info). Also a Work-Based Learning assessor in her own right, Meg successfully blends support for individuals' achievement of government-funded qualifications alongside the development of their practical Web2.0 skills. Richard William Hand is a Mahara platform manager, module developer and theme/configuration designer for TDM (tdm.info), an official Mahara partner organization. Richard also supports and develops other Open Source Software platforms including Moodle, Drupal, and Joomla. He graduated with a first class honours degree in Computer Science from the University of Bristol in 2008 and won a national (UK) award for "Best Website Design" for one of his TDM Joomla! sites in 2009 (selected from 2000+ competitor sites).