My e-portfolio and Mahara...

When we were first introduced to the I-Reflect paper, we were told that we were to create our e-portfolio's on the website Mahara.
Mahara URL: http://myportfolio.ac.nz/

When I first looked at Mahara it seemed quite easy but I did face many challanges in creating my own e-portfolio...

Although, I had never created an e-portfolio before it seemed to be easy enough and our lectures were very happy to show us anything we needed to know, also the same with our peers of the I-Reflect class..

I decided straight away that I wanted to do my e-portfolio on my Fan-Fictions and put a proposal up straight away onto the Mahara website informing everyone about what my plans were for my e-portfolio and the sort of things I wanted to create.

I became very interested in my e-portfolio and spent many hours in class exploring all the different tools, and how to upload photos, videos etc....
Not long after I put my Proposal up, I added my first fanfictions for both Home and Away and Outrageous Fortunes. But I soon noticed that Mahara was quite a difficult website to use and I was having problems uploading documents and making them fit on the page so it looked neat and tidy. I am quite fussy with that sort of things so I spent a lot of time trying to get my work to look the way I wanted on the views. Another problem I was having was making my view accesible to the other I-Reflect students and our tutors. A few times I was told that an error had occured and I had to re-try many times to make the view accesible but I did get there in the end after a lot of patience haha...

I then had a bit of break with my e-portfolio because I was stressed with other work and I forgot about it. But after 2 weeks I got back into it and wrote another three scenes for both Outrageous Fortunes and Home and Away.
After I had wrote the scenes I then played around with each of the views, in making them look they way I wanted them and I also uploaded many videos and pictures of the characters of the show so that my readers could get a feel for the characters and see who they were reading about without getting too confused...

I learned on the Mahara website that the easiest things to do was to create everything I wrote in my blog, and then create a view and upload it through there, that way everything came out neat and tidy and I was happy with the layout.
With uploading pictures I also uploaded all of my pictures I wanted to use in a folder so that when I needed to put them on a view I could locate them very easy without fussing around too much....
The first feedback I got from Paul and Patsy was ok, they said I was on track and things were going well as long as I kept on with the tasks.
But my second feedback wasn't as great as the first one, there were a few things I needed to do like communication more with the I-Reflect group as I was having more of an offline presence!

I also hepled out one of my peers when she was having a tough time in the layout of her e-portfolio. I explained to her how I did mine and that it worked quite well for me in being able to control where my posting and pictures etc were put on the page in my views. She then took my advice and changed her views so that all of her posts were first put into blogs and then she copied them into the view, so I was happy that I was able to help her fix the problems she had.
I have added a few hyperlinks into my e-portfolio like the Home and Away official website and the Outrageous Fortunes official website so my readers could go there and find out more information on the shows to get a better undertstanding of them. I also made the hyperlink on my e-portfolio to this website here, www.blogger.com
I decided to do all my reflective stuff on blogger and put a hyperlink on my e-portfolio site because of some of the problems I had encountered by using Mahara and I also have worked with blogger.com a lot before and I find it so easy to use...
I also added a hyperlink to some of the other work I have done in other classes for uni, so you can have a better understanding of me as a person. There is also the Fan-Fiction through that hyperlink that shows where my Home and Away Fan-Fiction all started. URL to my other work: http://ashleigh042.110mb.com/

One of the interesting things that happened to me when I wrote my fan-fiction for Outrageous Fortunes last year for one of my uni papers was that after I had handed the Fan-Fiction assingment in, what I had written for one of the characters actually happened on the show the next episode. I made on of the daughter's pregnant and the next episode of the show I watched they had made her pregnant on the real show, although how she found out she was pregnant was different to how I had written it, it was still a huge coincidence!!
So mabye, I could be good enough to write for a show like Outrageous Fortunes as I have the same ideas as them!!!

I-Reflect was very different for me, I had never done an online paper before so it many challanges for me but I feel that I have acheived these and come out with a good e-portfolio that I can be proud of and use later in life for job opportunities. In this paper it was very cruizy there were no real time frames that certain thing had to be done by then, we had our three briefs that we had to do but if somethings was a bit late it wasn't like we would lose marks for it, it is a paper that is very independent and I think I enjoyed being able to pick my own topic and develop it the way I wanted to instead of having set rules on paper that I had to obey by.

I think that my e-portfolio is a good asset for me to keep and I hope my readers enjoyed reaidng my Fan-Fictions, I also hope it encourages others to become interested in something like this because it is a very interesting topic and you can have a lot of fun with it, being imaginative and creative...

I will definietly keep adding things to my e-portfolio even though the paper has now finished because I can use it to showcase my writing off and use it as sort of a hub to store all my documents I have written etc.
It has definietly been a good paper and I have enjoyed it thoroughly, the best thing is I get to have this e-portfolio of me work with me forever...