Meeting with Lizzie Jackson

Tara Dulake and myself met with Lizzie Jackson today.

The information that we gathered from Lizzie is Ravensbourne have an open source e-portfolio online software called Mahara. This is, according to Lizzie, a blank slate, nothing is on it, so we could potentially have our online portfolio site on here.

The idea of a social network and portfolio is something that management at Ravensbourne have a great deal of interest in. There is currently a group, who have named themselves "the student web services". According to Lizzie Jackson, this was a project that they worked on which was not E&E. They are going to be doing a presentation on Monday. They are looking to team up with people because they do not wish to do it by themselves. So there is an opportunity to collaborate here.

The use of Mahara is currently being tested with two students. So we could look in to designing a profile and then uploading this on to Mahara for testing. The person to speak to about this is a man named John White. Mahara portfolio would only be visible to internal eyes. I explained to Lizzie that Carlos's portfolio site idea would be for employers and for collaboration between students i.e internal and external. So for example, if the 3rd year animation students need sound designers, then this site would be the best way of looking out for the right person.

Lizzie then explained that you could copy the link to your portfolio and send it to people. This idea didn't sound very good to me, because students might as well sign up to the other portfolio sites that are out there. I asked it was possible for the portfolios to have an option to be public; like blogspot; blogspot gives you the option for your blog to be findable by the Google search engine.

I found out yesterday that Ravensbourne are looking to implement a new scheme for prospective students, which is for the applicants to submit their interview material online. This will be done through a server called VPN, which is outside the college firewall. This saves Ravensbourne having to give out passwords.

So this is the research that Tara and I have found on the portfolio and social networking schemes that Ravensbourne wish to implement.