Derrin Kent’s Blog

I often get asked the difference between Mahara and Facebook / Ning / other social media sites.  This is what I am currently saying:

Mahara cannot be substituted by cloud (SaaS) sites (like Facebook or Ning) because:

• educational institutions need to use focussed, explicitly-designed and bespoke-branded educational software identified with a single url and a common e-portfolio design structure / framework
• educational institutions do not need to cope with students’ use of an ever widening range of loosely- joined, non-uniformly-joined and generic social media ie small pieces - loosely joined.   NB Mahara learners, though, can bring in any work previously completed in (eg) You Tube / SlideShare / Twitter / Facebook.  ie small pieces - coherently joined and presented.
• educational institutions need control over their own documentation and databases (for data-security and safeguarding)
• educational institutions need to invest in software which cannot be withdrawn from the market (open source software cannot go away and licence fees cannot be compulsorily invoked)
• educational institutions need to invest in software suppliers who cannot price them out of the market (licence fees cannot be compulsorily invoked on any Open Source Software - OSS service agencies like TDM ( http://tdm.info ) are obliged to maintain high quality and competitive pricing to survive against competitor service suppliers - because TDM do not own the software itself)
• …and because when teachers want to teach students, they don´t go and teach them in the park / playground (ie Facebook / Ning), …..instead, they call them into school (ie Mahara / Mahoodle) in order to set an appropriate tone - and effective supervision - for formal learning.

Hope that helps.