What have we been doing lately?

It has been a while since I have made a blog post, as I just seem to have been a little out of control lately. Our upgrade to Mahara 1.4 went pretty well, and I (like many of our users) am getting used to it now. While the functionality is much the same, I think the improvements to navigation are excellent. I would welcome any thoughts from our users as well. Open Source software is both a blessing and a curse. We don't like to customise too much as when the next upgrade to the core code comes along, everything breaks. On the other hand, you are at the mercy of the community priorities. We are still having a few hassles with email notifications from time to time, but that is not a Mahara issue but rather a local one for us.

I really like Collections, and I have been developing an open Social Media Marketing course using FolioSpaces, and a couple of collections. Fortunately I have a great group of students who are patient as I am developing and piloting the course on the run. Nothing like having 50 different projects running at once to keep you honest. We are also using Google+ (for communication/interaction/sharing) and that has been a great experience. I could (perhaps should) have used a FS group, but I like trying new media. We are basically running the course with Google+, FS and Twitter so it is great fun trying to keep up with it all.

FolioSpaces needs a Spring clean, and it will come I promise. Most of our help pages are now out of date, so I will start making a few videos, and posts about new features. For now we have linked to the Mahara.org help files (which are up to date), but it is good to have some local ones as well.

It is now more than three years since we started FolioSpaces. We have a few great institutional members, a lot of premium individual members, and thousands and thousands of free members. We value you all and Steve and I are just as committed to providing a global ePortfolio service now as we were at the beginning. What is really exciting is we have noticed users are now working their portfolios a lot harder than they were. There is some great public content. It would be good to share some, I just need to figure out how without causing privacy concerns. For now you are welcome to visit our Social Media Marketing course as one example of a work in progress....