I am most certainly the oldest participant in this conference, I used to be the German Mahara Granny introducing Mahara in Germany in a European project called MOSEP – More Self-Esteem with my E-Portfolio- E-portfolios as a method to prevent early school leaving and foster successful learning of students.
This was in 2008 and I had already been in teacher training for Moodle for some time, always with the focus on the learners and how they could benefit from Moodle with their learning. So this "Mahara call" came just in time as I was not satisfied with the way learners could showcase their learning in moodle and I had started to introduce blogging for them. But Mahara was the tool I had been waiting for to make learning more student centered and giving them more freedom - very difficult to sell to the teachers though - teachers being the absolute control freaks !
From the start the Mahara community was a very helpful community , at the time there were Penny Leach and Nigel McNie who were my direct troublesolvers on skype, you will see them in my presentation - and oh!!!! I needed them a lot as the first Mahara version was quite buggy and a challenge !!!
The rest of the story you can see in my keynote when I was invited to the 2015 MaharaHui in Southampton
and you will also meet people from this conference there, like Sam Taylor , Linda Pospisilova, my Mahara "daughter" from Czech republic and Christine Duelfer, my other Mahara "daughter" from Germany who have both been doing a great job with integrating Mahara in their students' learning settings, very proud of them.
My very special thank goes to the wonderful, patient, effective , creative Kristina Hoeppner who has been a great community manager all these years since she took over from Penny! And she still finds time for her hobby, photographing . Keep up the good work Kristina!
So looking forward to tomorrow to sell all the other family members