What are Views in Mahara?
In Chapter 2, Getting Started with Mahara, we introduced the concept of being able to create "web pages" in Mahara, which we call Views. You also got a glimpse of how easy it is to use the drag-and-drop facility of View in order to add blocks to a View when tailoring your Profile Page.
Views are great! They are one of the stand-out features of Mahara and we think you are really going to enjoy learning to use them. Views, like blogs, are an excellent tool for reflection. The difference between the two is that a blog is very text orientated with a user reflecting on a topic in writing (with usually an odd image or video to supplement the text), but Views allow you to express your ideas in more of a "web page" type format using lots of different blocks. Also, Views are flexible; you can very easily add and remove whichever blocks you want.
You can include a variety of items in your View such as text, images, profile information, and even blogs. When you have done that, you can rearrange them how you wish by changing the View layout.
Not only can a View be used for personal reflection on a topic, but Views are also great for presenting information to others. You can control access to your Views, meaning you get to decide who sees your Views and when. Let's think about some of the things you can do with Views in Mahara:
- You could present all of your ideas related to one of the topics in a qualification you are taking. This could be for your own reference or you may choose to share access to this View with your tutor or classmates.
- You could use a View to take notes on all of the thoughts, ideas, links, and so on, that you gather while you are attending a conference (if you have a wireless connection). You can then share the View with your colleagues after the event to show them what you have learned.
- You could use a View to explore and express your thoughts on a particular aspect of your social or family life, such as a family holiday. This is likely to be private, and something you would only share with other members of your family.
- You could use a View as a tutor to present all of the important materials your learners need to read, watch, listen to, and think about in preparation for a particular topic they are going to study with you. Lots of lecturers prefer to use Mahara to present their work instead of doing so in a Virtual Learning Environment such as Moodle. This may be partly because the lecturer's name (and avatar) will continue to be associated with the work presented in the Mahara View even after they retire or move on to another academic institution.
- You could use a View to present an ongoing progress report on a project you are doing at work. You might make a blog post an element of this View as well as make important files related to your project available for sharing.
These are just a few examples, but of course there are potentially hundreds of different things that you could use a Mahara View to achieve.
There are three stages to View creation. Let's see the first stage of this process; how we can create a View from scratch and add content to it.