Time for action—multiple file upload
- Start by putting all the files you want to upload to Mahara into one folder.
- Then compress or zip the folder. The resulting zipped folder will end in
.zip, .tar, or.tar.gz. How you zip a folder will depend on which operating system you are using but there is plenty of online help to show you how to do this. - Upload your newly created zipped folder to a relevant place in your Mahara Portfolios as you would with any other file. You should now see it in your files area.
- You will see that an Unzip button has appeared. Click on it to begin unzipping the folder:
- The next page will show you the details of your zipped folder, including where the new files will appear in your Portfolio and which files are included in the zipped folder. Click Unzip again:
- The final page shows the unzipping in progress. When it's finished, you will see how many files/folders have been created. Click Continue to finish:
- You will now see that the new folder(s) and files have been added to your Portfolio.
What just happened?
You just learned how to add more than one file at a time to your Mahara Portfolio.
Now let's look at how you can add tags to your files.
Using tagging to organize your files and search for them
"Tags" are a really useful feature and are being increasingly used in modern web technologies. When you tag something, you are giving it a label, which describes something about it. Each tag is a single descriptive "keyword" Tags become useful later on when it comes to searching for items. All files tagged with a certain keyword are grouped together, so they become much easier to locate. Also, you may not want to locate a specific file by name, but to find files within a certain topic area.
As an example, you may know that you have some images of cars in your Mahara files area and would like to find one without knowing the file name. Since you have tagged all the files with the keyword "car", you can search on that keyword and will have a selection of car images to choose from.
Janet chose to tag her video upload with three different tags:
The next time Janet uploads a file, she could choose to click Show my tags. She will then see:
She can now see that hobbies, social, and video have already been used as tags and how many times that has happened. She can select from these tags for her latest file as well as add more new tags underneath. Before long, Janet is going to have a really useful "tagsonomy" or classification system for her files, and do you know what's best of all? When Janet has put up a lot of files in her Mahara site, she will be able to quickly search for her files by entering the tag as a search term into the Search My Portfolio block on the right-hand column of her screen.
There is also a very useful Tags block, which comes with Mahara 1.2. This block shows you all the most popular tags in your Mahara site. Currently, Janet just has three tags entered:
As a certain tag becomes more popular (because you have tagged more files with the same tag), you will see that the size of the text in your Tags block will change to reflect this. The bigger the text, the more popular the tag. Janet has tagged another file as being a video, but it isn't a hobby video, nor is it social. The video tag text has changed to show that it is more popular than the other tags:
If you click on any of the individual tags listed in the Tags block, you will see a screen where you can manage your tags.
When you have a lot of tags in your Mahara, have a play using this section to search through your tags. You get the choice of doing this both alphabetically and by frequency. You can also edit your tags here.
It might be a good idea to use tags to complement, not replicate, your folder structure. For example, if you organize your folders into file types, it might be a good idea to use your tags to describe subject matter.
----- Punam from Pennytown Primary thinks -----
Pop quiz— files, folders, and tagging
- Which feature of Mahara is being described; "A single keyword that describes something about an item such as a folder or file in your portfolio. Useful for helping you to search for items in your portfolio":
a. Tags
b. Profile Information
c. Blogs
d. Files
- Think of three different ways that you could use to organize your Mahara folder structure.
- Does checking the copyright button when uploading a file to Mahara make you legally responsible for that file?
- If you start running out of quota space in Mahara, whom should you contact to look at getting some more?
Have a go hero—start setting up your files, folders, and tags
It goes without saying that your Mahara ePortfolio will probably become a lifetime project and that you will be making pretty big changes to your files and folders as you progress through your lifelong learning journey. We will see later in the book that a brand new feature in Mahara 1.2 is that you can import/export your data from Mahara platform to Mahara platform (or, indeed, another type of ePortfolio software platform) as you move around between employers and educational institutions.
However, we hope we have helped you to understand that it is a good idea to organize your files, folders, and tags systematically and logically.
Please spend some time now uploading some of your most precious and useful files and then start organizing those files into some sort of sensible structure using folders, file descriptions, and tags.