My Mahara ePortfolio

Thanks to a Facebook posting by one of my colleagues in Australia, I found a free hosting site for Mahara: http://foliofor.me/. This service limits file storage to 50 MB. But all of my artifacts are stored on one of my websites, and all of my videos are stored in one of the video sharing services, so I don't need a lot of storage. (YouTube now lets me upload videos longer than 15 minutes, so I uploaded a lot of my recorded presentations and some of my older videos.) I spent the entire evening developing the 41st version of my portfolio with this service. (I guess there is another free Mahara hosting service, Foliospaces.com which offers a Premium upgrade for $40/year for up to 2 GB storage.)

My portfolio is located at: http://foliofor.me/view/view.php?id=4448
I wrote my reflection on the process on a page in the portfolio. I didn't try Mahara in the past because I didn't have a server and the portfolio views were a single page. However, this version let me set up a Collection, which groups pages together and places a navigation bar across the top. There are no sub-pages, and the process was a little quirky, requiring a lot of clicks to do a task. But the drag-and-drop nature of creating pages and populating them with content is fairly intuitive.

The tool has a journal (blog) which can be embedded on a page as either the entire blog, or individual blog entries. Each journal entry can have attachments and multiple tags, to make searching easier. There is a tool to create Plans, which I need to explore further. I also set up a group, which could be used for collaboration and discussion. I might explore using this tool in a future online class. Now I need to see if I can upload artifacts with the PortfolioUP iPhone app.