Mahara will be a displayer of badges once others than Mozilla can also be badges backpacks. We hope that this code will be released soon so we can implement it into the next release.

For the time being however, there is a quick and dirty hack to show off your badges in Mahara by using an iFrame. Here’s what you have to do.

1. Ask your site administrator to add “backpack.openbadges.org/share” to the list of allowed iFrames. This can be done from Mahara 1.6 on. If you are on Mahara 1.5, your site administrator needs to delve into the code to add the URL.
2. Go to your Mozilla Backpack and create a collection for the badges that you would like to display.
3. Make this collection public.
4. Copy the URL of your public collection and create an iFrame code around it. An easy tool is the Online iFrame generator. Just paste your URL in there, choose the settings you’d like to have, and off you go. I chose scrolling and a width and height of 800px.
5. Copy the resulting iFrame code.
   Mine looked like this:

   <iframe src=”http://backpack.openbadges.org/share/cb5f7bf2cfcfbf0bfcb7470f2798bb67/” style=”border:0px #FFFFFF none;” name=”myiFrame” scrolling=”yes” frameborder=”1″ marginheight=”0px” marginwidth=”0px” height=”800px” width=”800px”></iframe>

   You can use this iFrame code and just replace the URL which is displayed in bold.

6. Create a page in your Mahara portfolio and set the layout to 1 column only.
7. Either use the “Text box / note” block or the “External content” block to embed your iFrame. I am going to use the “External content” block because it’s easier.
8. Paste your iFrame code into the block, give it a heading and you are done.
9. Save the block. Your badges now appear in your page.

For an example, check out my iMoot badges page.

I had chosen this topic because lately discussions have been around the use of smartphones and tablets with Mahara but also a general trend at schools (at least in New Zealand) can be seen to go down the road of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). Schools let go of a lot of control when they allow their students to bring any device to school to connect to the Internet and use it for classroom work. There is no uniformity anymore in technology and in some ways it becomes more difficult to manage because there are now multiple operating systems in play, different sizes of the devices, some or touch devices while others aren’t, there is no uniformity in software that is installed and so on. However, it also gives the students the freedom to choose with which device they want to work with. They do not have to buy the latest, most expensive tablet or laptop computer out there but can go with a more affordable option and also their preferred software / work environment.

I prepared my presentation working with my two Android devices: a small mid-range smartphone and a 10″ tablet. Because I only had about 20 minutes time, I decided not to do a live demo, but use slides run on my computer instead to avoid any glitches. In the end, I did have a couple of minutes time for a quick demo and hooked up my tablet to my computer to be able to show its screen on the projector easily. All this went very smoothly until it came to logging into the demo site on the computer. Typing my password in front of an audience is not the best thing to do. So next time, I’ll make sure that I am logged in with the correct account before taking the stage. I have yet to try to connect my tablet directly to a projector.

<musing>Maybe one day I will just take my tablet to a conference instead of my computer and work just off it. I did use only my tablet for note taking during other sessions because my tablet comes with a pen which makes writing very easy. Then I don’t need to have my computer open and type. However, I still like typing and being able to use my shortcuts to copy and paste and search online quickly. I’m still quite clumsy on my tablet I think, partly also because I’m reduced to typing with fewer fingers. But adding an external keyboard would not make much sense because then I might as well just use my laptop.</musing>

There are three ways to enhance the use of Mahara on a mobile device:

• Use a responsive design theme
• Use MaharaDroid (sorry iOS users, you are out of luck)
• Use PortfolioUp (for iOS users)

The apps can be installed from their respective stores. MaharaDroid is the more powerful and feature-rich one because it doesn’t just allow you to upload photos and videos, but pretty much anything that you can share on your Android device. Furthermore, you will also be able to sync notifications and content from your Mahara instance with your device and write a journal entry directly from within MaharaDroid in version 2.1 which is currently in beta.

For MaharaDroid, developed by Catalyst as open source software, you can add your feature wishes directly in the issue tracker.

Leo from Brightcookie, the people behind PortfolioUp, set up a form for users to submit their feature wishes for extending this application.

And what about the responsive design: Mahara’s default theme is responsive and can be copied and adapted to your institution’s needs. In my presentation I show off the theme our design team created for Catalyst. It sports a very custom dashboard image instead of the standard table that you see on the dashboard to make the theme our own. This part of Mahara is not responsive, but it adds a great deal to the customization for an institution because you can highlight Mahara functionality that is important to your institution and bring in your culture.

Below is the presentation I gave including the audio recording.

Back in 2012 Catalyst was asked to provide specifications for expanding the Mahara assignment submission plugin to account for the deprecation of MNet by Moodle sometime in the future and to allow for keeping submitted portfolios for accountability in case a student challenged a grade. All other functionality was supposed to stay. Since then a number of functionalities have changed in Moodle and Mahara. Thus hearing what users would like to see today is important for keeping the plugin relevant.

Altogether there were 18 users of Moodle and Mahara in my workshop on the Mahara assignment submission plugin. These came primarily from the tertiary education sector from Australia and New Zealand. But we also had a participant from Fiji and one from the secondary school level. Interestingly, only two of these 18 have used the plugin in question before. However, this did not pose a difficulty because then they were not limited by the current functionality, but could think very freely about what they would like to see in the plugin.

I split the large group into three smaller ones and allowed them time to talk to each other about what they would like to see and discuss their ideas in their groups after having had a quick introduction round. This part of the workshop was important to me so we had a basis for our discussions. We all didn’t know each other besides sometimes having engaged in the online forums. That’s why the introductions were the opportunity for us to put context around where we were coming from.

All three groups had lively discussions and came up with numerous ideas for the future Mahara assignment submission plugin. During the final big group discussion, every group put forward their top ideas which we captured on the whiteboard:

• Group submissions of assignments as is now possible in the Moodle assignment. This would be ideal with the setting up of Moodle groups / groupings automatically in Mahara.
• Display Moodle assignments in Mahara as well as the results.
• Submit an entire collection and not just individual pages.
• Have the choice to lock a page when it is being submitted; allow for re-submitting of Mahara pages / collections. I.e. allow for more formative and not only summative assessment. Submitting a Mahara page / collection could mean just to submit for the teacher to give feedback, but that doesn’t mean the page would need to be locked.
• Keep a snapshot for accountability like with other assignments that need to be archived. Potentially have options of what to keep.
• Allow for versioning of pages / collections in Mahara.
• Submit a page / collection to Moodle directly from within Mahara so students don’t have to go to the assignment in Moodle first, but can click a button in Mahara.

We also had a few ideas that were not directly related to the assignment submission plugin:

• Have chat functionality in Mahara. This is already a wishlist item on Launchpad.
• Trigger for giving feedback.
• Have more options where Moodle content ends up in Mahara when it is being exported.

Now we’ll just need the funding to implement changes and new features. Mahara is an open source project and while everyone can take its source code and run with it, there are costs involved for developing the software further be it by institutions themselves or through providing funding to have Mahara developers perform the task.

If you have further ideas or want to expand on some of the ones listed above, please join the discussion.

Being a member of the core Mahara development team, I love hearing and seeing how people use the software and what they create with it. In this case, the integration with Moodle, a LMS that we also work with at Catalyst IT, played a big part because both systems complement each other nicely.

Thanks to Allison’s reshuffling of my workshop session, I could participate in Shane Nuessler‘s Moodle-Mahara design workshop. Shane explains his workshop very well in his blog post. I liked that it was a true workshop and not a pretend one as we see so often at conferences. Something is labeled a workshop, but essentially it is a long presentation or a series of presentations. Shane had us work in groups and brainstorm ideas in a fast pace.

We only presented our final ideas for the Moodle-Mahara integration and then had a blind voting on it by closing our eyes while Shane counted votes. That was the only point in the workshop when only Shane was talking and otherwise it was quiet. For the rest of the time the room was buzzing with activity and discussions.

Jotting down our answers to his questions on sticky notes that we then put on the windows or walls, I wished we had had time to spend on the sticky notes that weren’t just our ideas as well to see if there were any other commonalities between our distinct groups. As we only had 45 minutes and needed every minute of it for our group work, there was only time to talk about the improvements that we would like to make to the integration. I can imagine a similar workshop with more time on our hands where we share more during the design process to identify common themes that could then be worked on.

An alternative to the voting for an entire team in the end would be to vote for the best three ideas no matter in which team they originated.

Following are a few ideas from the workshop that stuck with me in particular. As I see a lot of wishes for Mahara in our bug and wishlist tracker, some are more familiar to me than others. Here are some that should be added:

• Tagging assessment tasks with key outcomes as per the curriculum (Moodle and / or Mahara depending on where the assessment takes place).
• Submit assessments as a group in Mahara. More on this in my next post.
• Have (feedback) notifications on your mobile device.
• Help buttons should have clear information on what is going to happen next.

One group also said to start with Mahara and not Moodle and make Mahara the main platform because that is where the artifacts will live longer and because it’s the space where students have the control over their content.

We could have found many more ideas than we had put on the sticky notes, but having to limit ourselves to our top 3 really brought out the essence and the most important ones to go from.

In my next post I’ll summarize my brainstorming session for the Mahara assignment submission plugin.

1.7 release

One of the great things of the past months is our latest release of Mahara. We are up to version 1.7 and the 6-monthly release cycle is tough. However, it is also fantastic because we are making new features available very quickly that way and give them to the community to try out and use.

So yesterday evening, we hit all the buttons for this release. There is a lot of things to do to get it done and not just one button to press. And we have already been working on the 1.8 release.

We have a number of fantastic features in this release including:

• license metadata on content
• the logging of masquerading sessions and notifications about them to users for more transparency
• retractable blocks allowing users to just show a block heading and not the entire block content

Back in January, six high school students who participated in the third Catalyst Open Source Academy fixed a number of bugs and also created new features. Altogether they have 20 commits in this release. Whoopie. Some of them even use Mahara at school in the form of MyPortfolio.school.nz. Once we upgrade this site mid-year, their classmates and also teachers will be using the improvements they have made to the software.

Mahara gear

But what would the last few months have been without our fantastic designer? Evonne did not only create awesome profile pictures for the fictional characters in the user manual, but also came up with the designers for our gear / merchandise that is available on Cafepress.

Fancy a T-shirt, stickers or flip flops? Now you can get them to show your support for the project. SInce our software project lives from its various contributors who do not have to be developers, but who fulfil a series of other jobs like translating the software, testing it, reporting bugs and making feature suggestions, we wanted to make something special for them as well. Thus, besides the logo T-shirts etc., they can also have their gear showing how they contribute to the Mahara project. Imagine a Mahara event where contributors wear “their” T-shirt and you can easily see who is a core developer, who tests the software, who translates it etc.

We got our first stickers with the new designs and I am stoked about them. The characters are awesome and show that Mahara is a collaboration between many people who make it happen.

Designs of our new Mahara stickers

Which character are you?

Here’s a little retrospective of 2012 in pictures.

Artwork by Lisa

28 presentations by Kiwicon veterans and newbies had the audience captivated. In the evening there was more entertainment planned than ever. And now who says that nerds can’t be social? Drinks flowed freely, games were on, clubbing was organized as well as a movie night. The Opera House ushers – if they hadn’t already been working at Kiwicon 5 – certainly had a different experience than with their usual opera crowds.

The Kiwicon Crüe outdid itself again this year (is there a word beyond superlative?) with awesome name tags and lanyards. This year we all had floppy disks: from 3 1/2″ ones for regular attendees to 5 1/4″ ones for speakers to huge 8″ ones for The Crüe. The high rollers received hard-to-get backup disks. These are definitely worth keeping and nothing like your regular conference-grade boring name tags.

High roller name tag and disk: A lot of bling

As usual, some presentations were way beyond my comprehension, others were easy to follow, then there were the ones where I just stared open mouthed, and the last but not least category was the ones of the awesome humor. Now, I don’t want to give a recount of each presentation because you had to be there to experience it, but I just want to highlight a few of them.

I got your number

Nick von Dadleszen is a regular Kiwicon speaker, and this year he continued frightening us with news from the Mobile NFC hacker world and gave a demonstration of his latest tool which he could also persuade a bunch of people to install (hackers trust each other, right) and test during Kiwicon.

If you have a RFID chip – and you most likely will have one on a credit card, Snapper card, or your passport – you better get some RFID blocker so people with simple smartphones can’t read them. Nick presented his latest tool for Android with which you just need to put the phone onto the card with the RFID chip, and it reads all its information. It works like a charm and over 370 cards and Snappers and passports were scanned during the 2 days.

You could have heard a pin drop

Cartel, another Kiwicon regular, was asked to give his presentation early swapping with another presenter. That gave him about 5 minutes to polish his slides and go through his demos again. For some reason, the demo gods weren’t in a good mood and almost all of his demonstrations failed. While he was trying to troubleshoot his commands to run the demos, you could have heard a pin drop in the audience because nobody moved (except to the front of their seats), and everybody was glued to the screen. The audience made it their mission to help Cartel figure out the problem and possible solutions were shouted out at intervals, and everybody held their breaths to see if it worked.

Normally, when you are at another conference, the audience gets impatient when something doesn’t work, people start talking to each other or even leave. Not so at Kiwicon. Here it seemed like a a code of honor to stay put and help the presenter figure out the problem. The problem became a challenge for the entire audience.

Hacker on the road

Hackers don’t just sit in front of their computers in dingy and dark rooms, but they can be found out in the open participating in sports. Denis Andzakovic combined his two passions of hacking and riding motorbikes by sniffing out WLANs around the country simply by riding his bike. His gear fits into saddlebags, and he collects the data while he enjoys the landscape. He mapped his data and showed us the impressive result of whee WLANs can be found across New Zealand, and he could zoom in on each.

WLAN mapping on a motorbike

Honor your ancestors

Hacking is not a new profession and viruses etc. have been around for a considerable time. Metlstorm took us back to the 1980s when New Zealand’s first virus, Stoned, was created. He took us on a tour and brought history to life uncovering the truths and half-truths and lies. His presentation was the funniest hands down besides being informative and insightful. He also sported the most ancient equipment seen at Kiwicon. The computer didn’t even have a VGA cable that could be hooked up to the projector and thus a video camera had to be employed.

Metlstorm retelling the history of “Stoned”

Thank you, Crüe

A big thank you goes again to the Kiwicon Crüe for putting on such an amazing show which didn’t just start on the conference days, but already when you went to the web site to read up on it and when you registered.

And another big thank you for the Raspberry Pi I received during the closing session. I should have all supplies together soon to set it up over Christmas.

Kiwicon 7

Although Kiwicon 6 just finished, I am already looking forward to Kiwicon 7 and the multitude of interesting, challenging and mind-boggling presentations and discussions. It’s a conference that is not to be missed.

A few days ago, Liz, one of my new co-workers, started using MediaWiki templates to display client system information more elegantly in our internal wiki. I knew we used some shortcuts in our wiki to pull in information from other systems, but I hadn’t associated that with templates and didn’t think I’d be able to create some of these myself.

Now that Liz created this new template for our Koha clients, I looked at her template page and decided to adapt it to our Mahara clients. Taking something existing and adapting it is not as scary as trying to come up with everything yourself.

Fortunately, I could use most of the items she had in her template, and I only read the MediaWiki templates page trying to understand a bit more. To be honest though, it was easier trying to work out what Liz had done than following the page. Besides, the template that she had created produced a table.

The current template that can still be tweaked over time is:

{{TemplateDoc}}[[Category: Templates]]

{| style="border: thin solid #a0a0d0;"
{{ #if: {{{SystemName|}}} |
      {{!}} colspan="3" {{!}} '''{{{SystemName|}}}'''
      {{!}}-
}}
| Client name
| colspan="2" | {{{Client|TBA}}}
|-
| Production URL
| colspan="2" | {{{ProductionURL|TBA}}}
|-
| Staging URL
| colspan="2" | {{{StagingURL|TBA}}}
|-
| Testing URL
| colspan="2" | {{{TestingURL|TBA}}}
|-
| Design URL
| colspan="2" | {{{DesignURL|TBA}}}
|-
| Connection information
| colspan="2" | {{{ConnectionInfo|TBA}}}
|-
| System classification
| colspan="2" | {{{Classification|TBA}}}
|-
| Mahara version
| colspan="2" | {{{MaharaVersion|TBA}}}
|-
| Git branch
| colspan="2" | [{{{url|http://URLtotheGitRepository{{{GitBranch|TBA}}}}}} {{{GitBranch|TBA}}}]
|-
{{ #if: {{{Author}}} |
      {{!}} Last edited by
      {{!}} colspan="2" {{!}} {{{Author|}}}
      {{!}}-
}}
| Added date
| colspan="2" | {{{Date|TBA}}}
|-
| Client status
| colspan="2" | {{ #if: {{{Status|}}} | {{{Status}}} | DRAFT }}
|-
  {{ #if: {{{Multitenanted}}} |
      {{!}}
      {{!}} Multitenanted Mahara?
      {{!}} {{{Multitenanted|}}}
      {{!}}-
  }}
  {{ #if: {{{Theme}}} |
      {{!}}
      {{!}} Custom theme?
      {{!}} {{{Theme|}}}
      {{!}}-
  }}
  {{ #if: {{{Customization}}} |
      {{!}}
      {{!}} Are there any customizations?
      {{!}} {{{Customization|}}}
      {{!}}-
  }}
  |
  | Is there anything else worth mentioning?
  | {{{TodoOptional|TBA}}}
  |-
|}

When using it in a page, all I need to copy now is:

{{ MaharaSystem |
     SystemName=Client Mahara |
     Client=Client name |
     ProductionURL=http://|
     StagingURL=http://|
     TestingURL=http://|
     DesignURL=http://|
     ConnectionInfo= VPN, Internet, Local, Other |
     Classification=Hosted, Self Hosted |
     MaharaVersion=version number |
     GitBranch=|
     Author=~~~ |
     Date=~~~~~ |
     Status=Setup, Live |
     Multitenanted=Yes, No |
     Theme=Yes, No |
     Customization=Short name for customization|
     TodoOptional= |
}}

That produces the following tabe:

Et voilà. Done.

It would even be better if I could collect all the information I put onto individual wiki pages using that template on one combined one so I see everything on an overview page. I think Semantic MediaWiki might be able to help there because what I want to do is aggregate information found on one wiki page on another without having to enter the information twice. I’ll check with a colleague who is more knowledgable about that if that were the case or if there is another way of doing that in our current MediaWiki implementation.

Upon my return home, I tried the SIM card immediately and lo and behold, it worked much better and slides in and out without any obstruction. I only had to do a minimal amount of setup because my apps had been backed up to my Google account. Finally, I can play with the Note and explore its functionality.

THE END

A couple of other tablets I’ve used could not deal well with capacitive pens and thus I could not use any of them for writing, and writing with a finger was just plain painful because I always needed to write very large and the speed wasn’t the greatest. Thus, when I stumbled upon the new Note 10″ tablet, I got really excited, and bought it when it came out in New Zealand from a tech store near me (and not through one of the web sites of parallel imports – lucky me).

It is a very beautiful device that runs the latest Android, the pen is a joy and the handwriting works very well on it. You can set it up in dual screen mode and for example watch a video on the left and take notes on the right. It is just sweet as. I know that this is not much of a review, but this post is not intended as such. Besides, I soon discovered that my new device had a deficiency: The SIM card slot wouldn’t work properly. Normally, you are supposed to be able to slot cards in and out of slots easily no matter whether they are SIM or SD cards – of course provided you put them into the correct slots. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with my SIM card slot. I had trouble getting the SIM card in and didn’t dare to push it all the way in. When I looked more closely, I saw that a metal “something” (can’t really say whether it was a contact or something else, it looks a bit like thin wire that needs to connect with the SIM card or some such) was protruding into the space where the SIM card needed to go and actually scratched the card.

Thus, I took my device back to the store (remember: lucky me I bought it in town and not through an overseas site), they looked at it, deemed it worthy to be sent in to Samsung because it was clearly something that was not correct in the device. Unfortunately, they did not have a demonstration model with the SIM card slot in store to check whether they all had that metal thing there or whether it really was a defect. So, they shipped the tablet back to Samsung in mid-October after having ascertained that pictures of the fault weren’t enough to show the fault and after I got back from a business trip so I could wipe my data (which wasn’t much anyway). Since then I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting.

I received a couple of updates from the store letting me know that Samsung was still looking into the issue. The guys in the store have always been helpful and kept up the communication chain with Samsung. Today I went to the store for an update, and the technician told me that the device had been shipped back to the store because Samsung management (apparently it had been escalated from the Samsung service center to a management level) did not recognize the fault in the device as a manufacturing default. They said if I wasn’t happy with that decision that I could take it up myself (not through the store anymore) onto a different escalation path.

The reply makes me wonder just a tiny bit: How come that something that is attached to the inside of the device that I didn’t put there is not a device fault? I only tried to slot a SIM card in and had trouble doing so from the first second. I could not have unhinged something in there. But even if I did with a smooth SIM card that didn’t have a hook, then there is still something wrong in the device because sliding a card in and out should not suck up metal parts and make them stick into an opening that is entirely taken up by a card if the card is slid in. The part in question is not something that can fall out or that is loose by itself and can be moved. I have no idea if it can be pushed back where it’s supposed to be because I wouldn’t want to do that in order not to damage something (and I don’t have the tablet back yet). It is still firmly attached to the inside of the card slot.

It’s not yet the end because now I’m waiting for the store to send me my ticket details so I can take it along a different escalation path. I wonder what I will discover on my journey there and will keep you posted.

INTERMISSION