About

About My Portfolio

My Portfolio is a nationwide ePortfolio service managed and supported by Kineo (Pacific). All educational organisations are welcome to use My Portfolio. The key benefit of a learner driven environment being on a shared service environment is that pan sector learner communities may flourish. My Portfolio brings together the benefits of leading education technology and social software in a safe education focused environment.

My Portfolio uses open source software called Mahara. Meaning 'think' or 'thought' in Te Reo Māori, the name Mahara reflects the project's dedication to creating a user-centred life-long learning and development application underpinned by considerations of pedagogy and policy.

First established in mid 2006, the Mahara project started as collaborative venture funded by New Zealand's Tertiary Education Commission's e-learning Collaborative Development Fund (eCDF), involving Massey University, Auckland University of Technology, The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand and Victoria University of Wellington.

When the project officially ended in June 2007, the results of our pilot or action based research showed that Mahara has enormous promise as a 21st century learning environment, but was not quite ready for fully fledged production environments. Since July 2007, Kineo (Pacific) has guided the further development of Mahara with open source software specialists – Catalyst IT with the first full production version launched on 1 March 2008. This has been made possible by further support from New Zealand’s Ministry of Education and the application of Mellon Foundation funds from the Open Polytechnic’s winning a 2007 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration.

The system is modular in design to maximise flexibility and extensibility. The My Portfolio service will continue to grow as we continue to enhance the Mahara system. Because it is open source software, other organisations also contribute to the software’s evolution. This has already started with different language packs such as Polish and German. Mahara is already being used as far afield as Bulgaria.