Mahara and Moodle on the horizon

If you haven't heard, Mahara in an up and coming open platform for electronic portfolio and social networking. Sure, there are tons of social networking "web 2.0" doo-dads out there but this one is angled toward the e-Learning industry and grew out of the same general community as the excellent [and also free] Moodle LMS. There are even plans to integrate the two complementary packages.

I asked Penny Leach, one of the Mahara developers in New Zealand, what she envisions as potential applications for the platform:

"Off the top of my head, I can see a number of uses and application for Mahara within a corporate setting:

One example - it could be used to track and display Professional Development plans and activities between employees and their managers.

Another - a corporate group, for example an IT group could use Mahara to create lists of interesting articles of what's happening in IT.

It could also be used for employee profiles.

In terms of integration with other systems, Mahara has a really good authentication framework, similar to Moodle's, so it's relatively easy to write new plugins, which allows Mahara to integrate with HR systems for user information."

Thanks Penny. I don't know about you, but this excites me! Any new addition to the general mess of e-Learning deployment platforms can only be good, especially when it grows out of a well-established community.

How will you use Mahara? Or should I ask, how long will it be before Mahara and its contemporaries enter into the fickle e-Learning mainstream?

Penny's Blog