Mahara 1.3 RC1 has been released and the list of new features is promising. Does it mean that the book Mahara 1.2 ePortfolios: Beginner’s Guide is now outdated? I am pretty sure it is not. If you are just about to start with Mahara, either current stable version or the new one, you will find the book useful.

The book was published by Packt Publishing in February 2010 and I got a chance to read it recently. I was looking forward to it because as a teacher who had some personal experience with implementing Mahara at secondary and high school level, I was wondering what way of introducing e-portfolios to the students the authors recommend.

The guide was written by Derrin Michael Kent, Glenys Gillian Bradbury, Margaret Anne Kent, Richard William Hand. This team represents a balanced group of people with solid background in educational technology, open-source development, end-user training and learning design, too.

While reading the book, I enjoyed the focus on instant action. Since very first pages, reader can start experimenting with Mahara features being introduced. The concepts of the software are illustrated in many use cases from various environments like primary school, international corporate university or vocational training provider. These examples and scenarios helped me to extend my existing attitude to Mahara as I tended to see it as a software for schools only.

After the initial introduction into the environment, creating an account and setting up the user profile, the book guides the reader through key elements of Mahara system – artefacts, blocks and views. I appreciate that the authors managed to satisfy both kinds of readers. Those who need detailed step by step instructions on how to work with Mahara user interface will use the book as very well written manual. And those who prefer to explore the environment on their own by just playing with it will find some inspirative examples to think about.

In seven chapters, the book covers basically all available features of Mahara 1.2 including the users interaction, groups and institutions management and site administration. Touching all these areas, it offers a clear overview of what Mahara is and help you to decide if it would suite your needs.

When I was explaining Mahara concepts to my students, we were able to prepare their first views during the first lesson. Of course, by just telling them click here, click there, it is not difficult at all in fact. Mahara has pretty, modern user interface, intuitive for people who are familiar with Internet social networks. But after reading this book, I was able to provide them more examples and think of other projects and situations where we could use Mahara successfully.

You will be able to become Maharan without this book, definitely. But if you are going to explain what Mahara is and how to work with it effectively to the others, this book is written for you.

Latest stable version 1.9.8+

There are 10 commits into the stable branch from the last week. Half of them, committed by Dan Marsden, deal with various SCORM issues (MDL-22168, MDL-22046, MDL-21568, MDL-18202, MDL-21444). Tim Hunt fixed three Quiz issues (MDL-22241, MDL-20586, MDL-22257). Thanks to Gordon Bateson, Hotpot module now uses HTML OBJECT tag instead of IFRAME, due to XHTML 1.0 strict compatibility (MDL-17702).

Unstable development version 2.0dev

Total of 294 commits found their way into the future version branch last week. Several various subsystems and major patches were included – for example the new My home page, Moodle Hubs support and many others. Petr Škoda’s recent patch, that reimplements the whole enrolment subsystem and changes some of the key concepts of roles and their assignments, is still being reviewed in a separate branch. Martin Dougiamas is going to announce the release of Moodle 2.0 – Preview 1 version, just working on the release notes yet.

Quotes of the week

“Users will remember for almost forever a bad/broken release; but will quickly forget that a stable/fine/working release was a year late.”
– Greg Mushial summarizes his experience from 40+ years involved in software development

“Beta version software is likely to be useful for internal demonstrations and previews to select customers. Some developers refer to this stage as a preview, a prototype, a technical preview (TP) or as an early access.”
– Wikipedia, Software release life cycle

Help tooltips in Moodle 2.0

Among many other (and definitely more significant and more important) improvements in Moodle 2.0, there is a new way how the help tooltips are handled. From the users’ point of view, help is still available via those question mark icons. Instead of opening a pop-up window in the browser, Moodle 2.0 uses YUI3 overlay to display a “bubble” with the help text. The behaviour of the tooltip had been a subject of a discussion (MDL-22067) and at the end, it was decided to follow the functionality found in Mahara or Github.

From the developer’s point of view, help texts are not stored in separate files any more. In the dark past, help files used to play a role of inline help, documentation, manuals or even tutorials on using Moodle. Nowadays, with Moodle Documentation portal being actively growing thanks the community contributions, we are trying to revert helps to what they are supposed to be – useful hints on various user interface elements, their meaning and usage. Therefore, the help files are being migrated into proper Moodle strings in 2.0.

For every help, two strings must be defined. One for the label of the thing the help is describing. In the forms, this is the label of the input element in almost all cases. The second string is the help text itself. The identifier of the second string must be the same as the identifier of the first one, just with “_help” suffix, for example:

$string['subject'] = 'Subject';
$string['subject_help'] = 'Message subject will be used as a title at the message view page.';

Let us say we want to add such help in a Moodle form, for ‘msgsubject’ input field. You would probably have a code like:

$mform->addElement('text', 'msgsubject', get_string('subject', 'mymodule'));
$mform->addHelpButton('msgsubject', 'subject', 'mymodule');

That would use the string ‘subject’ defined in your ‘mymodule’ language file as a title of the help and the string ‘subject_help’ defined in the same file as the help text. To get the same result in Moodle 1.9, you would have the help defined in a HTML file, let us say help/messagesubject.html a the code in the form would look like:

$mform->setHelpButton('msgsubject', array('messagesubject', get_string('subject', 'mymodule'), 'mymodule');

To display a standalone help icon anywhere at your page, use help_icon() method of the core renderer instance:

echo $OUTPUT->help_icon('subject', 'mymodule');

Help strings can use Markdown syntax for basic HTML formatting. We use that just for producing bullet list from the lines starting with asterisk.

To give the translators something to start with instead of rewriting all help strings from scratch, we are copying the contents of the translated help files into new help strings wherever it is possible.

Post scriptum

I can’t think of anything to write here today

A new book called Mahara 1.2 E-Portfolios: Beginner’s Guide has been released by Packt Publishing recently.

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.

I am currently waiting for a copy of the book and will write a review soon into this blog. Sample chapter is available for free in PDF format.