Mini Manual Mahara En

SEEKN Guide version 1.0

Content SEEKN Guide............................................................................................................................................1 Virtual community integration...................................................................................................................2 First step – registering and initial configuration...................................................................................2 Step 2 – general details about yourself..................................................................................................2 Step 3 – GROUPS, different levels of access and involvement............................................................4 Step 4 – Building a profile....................................................................................................................5 Step 5 – Building a portfolio.................................................................................................................9 Step 6 – Elaborate the generic presentation – profile view.................................................................13 Step 7 - Personalised views................................................................................................................19 Step 8 – Groups and forums ...............................................................................................................23 Step 9 - Settings and messages............................................................................................................26 FOR THE QUICK JUMPERS.................................................................................................................27 I have registered now what?................................................................................................................27 Where do I go to fill a profile?............................................................................................................27 How do I join a group?........................................................................................................................27 How do I check my messages?............................................................................................................28 by Constantinescu Nicolaie

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Virtual community integration

First step – registering and initial configuration In order to join our virtual community of practice, first you have to Register from the main page at http://hive.kosson.ro .

Illustration 1: Register new user This step will be complete after filling the form and click Register.

Illustration 2: Filling registration form Please take care of CAPTCHA as you have to pay attention to the characters in CAPS.

Step 2 – general details about yourself If you have not already login to the system, this is a very good moment to do so. Starting this moment you will have access to all configuration menus and most important thing is that you have access to all the features needed to build the online e-portfolio.

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Illustration 3: Authenticate to the system From the start page on the right side there are the groups you have already joined in. If you just arrived, no group will be shown to you as you were not invited nor joined one. Because one of the purposes of this platform is to build communication among specialists, I invite you to search for the public groups and join those you feel your contribution would be more welcomed. Please do not forget that the primary purpose of this who's who is to build an online e-portfolio to reflect competencies and skills of each and everyone of the participating specialists.

Illustration 4: Editing about section The first step to do after login is to edit About me section that contains the details seen for the first time at a short glance by your fellow colleagues meaning the details regarding means of contacting and 3

some introductory words that is like a short characterisation filled at introduction. Also you may put in the general details of your profile. If your fellow colleagues know you by a preferred name, this may be introduced here also.

Illustration 5: Every profile field is a separate artefact Some things should be taken into consideration even at this early step when first information starts the e-portfolio. That would be the degree of exposure of contact data and any other data that the participants may consider that they belong to a restricted class. We have to take into account that all the information is considered to be artefacts. These artefacts may be added independently to different views. This views are like facets made by different combinations of artefacts that serve different purposes like degree of personal involvement and trust established on global level or group level. What system does very elegantly is to provide means to establish how much personal data gets exposed to community or working groups. On short a user is able to manage very close the context in which a piece of information shows up or not.

Step 3 – GROUPS, different levels of access and involvement I've mentioned earlier before about the granularity that the system is offering regarding who gets access to what? Some levels of participation may be chosen to be discrete as private groups that are not visible and only invited persons are aware of. We will start to analyse the access level offered at the moment but through the eyes of the administrator as this view is more complete and offers more insight. An administrator (usually the user that has the power to initiate a group) has the following options when it comes to group visibility settings: he may declare the group as a visible one setting Publicly Viewable Group to yes or no. Declaring a group as a public visible one has one of the following effects regarding access: – group will be viewable by anyone who visits your group; – everyone will be able to see the group member listing, and see all discussions in the forums; – people will still have to become a member of the group before they can post to the forums; – regardless of this setting, your group file section and all files inside it will remain private It is possible that most of the group existing to be declared since their inception as being Publicly Viewable Group. Others may be declared as visible, but you have to request membership. After validation by one of the administrators you will be accepted or the opposite being explained to you the reason why. 4

There are another types of groups different from the visible ones. These groups may be joined after you have being sent an invitation by one of the group administrators. The conclusion is that when it comes to groups there is a public and a private side and the types of the groups may be adjusted to fit different needs.

Illustration 6: Setting groups and access policies In order to get a general picture, please take a look on Zone A from Conceiving and adjusting the view for different contexts illustration further bellow. More administrative details on Step 8.

Step 4 – Building a profile The main reason for deploying this communication platform is to put information science specialists from different parts of Europe in contact with an accent on Balkan participation. A second objective is to put one's knowledge and skills in a natural completion of another's thus forming a continuum of knowledge sharing and continuous building of new professional assets aiming a successful synergistic interconnection.

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Zone A

Imagine these views as if they were projected facets designed to offer information necessary for the other members to know you. They may be regarded as bits of your profile more or less detailed taken from you personal profile and put for others knowledge and information needs Zone B

Joining a grup could be done in three different ways: - join freelly if that group is public - by sending a request to join that has to be validated by one of the group administrators - based on invitation when a group exists but is not visible Conceiving and adjusting the view for different contexts

Once you have logged in, please access Profile menu and pick Edit Profile - About me.

Illustration 7: Fill in the profile As you can see from illustration 7, every field of this section (Edit profile), let that be those from About me, or Contact information, Messaging, and General, are ARTEFACTS – distinct elements, a fragment of information in itself that could form with other artefacts a view. This mechanism should be very well understood from the start regarding how views are built. Careful picked up artefacts may be the constituents of a particular view (facet) made up for a strict presentational purpose. Next step is to associate a profile image to the profile (Profile Icons). This will help better the participating colleagues to associate the expertise with the person. To do this, please access Profile Icons option and load an image that you consider it best presents you and afterwards confirm the association ticking Default control. Be careful because the image will not show if you do not confirm with Default.

Illustration 8: Attach an icon image to your profile Next step is to fill in the resume accessing My Resumé option. It is true that this operation takes the most time allocated for establishing a profile. There is the natural temptation to postpone this step until latter on but it is best to fill in right away or as soon as possible the resume so all the partners to have a 7

clearer view to your skills and expertise that you bring to the community.

Illustration 9: Filling in the resume Remember, please that after filling field after field from a distinct section, you have to confirm to every and each of then the entry in the database clicking on Save. There is a section for expressing the personal goals linked directly to your personal professional evolution and those linked to your academic progress.

Illustration 10: Declaring goals

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Please, access this section (My goals) not only to offer your fellow colleagues clues to what you would like to accomplish participating to the network, but also to express your willingness to get better in a certain domain and in this your manifested readiness to accept help and counselling. Next section you have to fill in belongs to your skills as seen in illustration 11 (skills). In case of a future partnership it is of the out most importance to have one's skills completing another. This section may be relevant in this approach and may bring information regarding existing abilities on a certain professional level that could serve to particular needs.

Illustration 11: Filling in the skills

Step 5 – Building a portfolio

After you have finished the resumé it is very important to add a few necessary information like the following sections: My Files, My Blogs, and My views. The order I have used to enumerate the sections it is important as it will lead you to finalisation of the process. It is recommendable for the moment to ignore section My views as this will gain relevance after completing the profile view (profile view from the Profile). If you would like you may add files up to a 50MB personal quota that you think are relevant to your profile. As a suggestion you may add a full Curriculum Vitae in European format or other files that 9

have relevance to your development like the newest articles or any other files you think would be necessary to share with your partners in the network.

Organising this area may be take the following path: a. if you do not have many files and you think that you will not add many more in the future, you may load all the files in the open (like the root directory of your allocated space – Upload file), and they will be shown right away. b. if your contributions are of more substance it would be better to organise your files in separate folders using (Create folder). Let us look at the simple case of loading a Curriculum Vitae – thought to contain far more information that the section My Resumé is holding.

Illustration 12: Loading files As you may see from illustration 12, a document representing a CV will be loaded in PDF format. There is a very, very important aspect that should not be overlooked easily. We have to take into consideration the copyright for all the materials you load. It is also a reminder at the loading phase that requires your to confirm that no copyright is infringed. I recommend you to load only strictly necessary materials. Photographs and any other type of media necessary to build views or any other kind of contribution it is better if you use dedicated services like flikr, youtube, google video, and slideshare. Do not clog the space reserved with files that could be linked from external services.

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After loading the files you may organise them using folders following different criteria (Create folder). The existing files and those which are about to be loaded may be dragged and dropped onto their corresponding folders.

Illustration 13: Drag and drop a file onto its corresponding folder Another aspect worth taking into consideration is that a user's quota is limited to 50MB.

The last step for filling the profile is personal profile page building accessing Edit profile view. Starting a blog One of the motives for which we would take this step is to communicate the personal knowledge adventure and discovery milestones. This is a very direct way to make this personal evolution known in regard to a particular field of knowledge or it may reflect a general view over a certain matter. Blogs have the function to balance personal experience with the collective one or just the personal view upon a certain subject. Blog postings are in fact artefacts that could be incorporated into a view and thus serve to enrich the collaborative environment.

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Illustration 14: Add new blog From the moment a blog was initiated like the one shown in illustration 14 a first posting should be entered using Add post:

Starting with this moment on you may regard a blog as a personal reflective space. Also, all the postings represent artefacts that may be taken and incorporated into a view if a certain purpose is met.

Illustration 15: New blog post

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Please, take into consideration a very important thing: for every blog and every posting you should add tags in order to give more meaning for the indexing engine to your content building a personal folksonomy. If you are clicking on Show my tags there will be shown a lot of tags that already had been entered. You may choose from this collection those who put meaning and set a proper machine friendly context.

Step 6 – Elaborate the generic presentation – profile view In order to finish editing your personal profile or better said e-portfolio it is absolutely necessary to Edit profile page. If you think why you hadn't done this already at a later stage when you have had built the resumé is that because at this stage only we have enough artefacts to complete the e-portfolio.

Illustration 16: Edit profile view - build the first view In fact, this section builds the first facet – view that we have talked already benefiting from some particular blocks informational content that may be dragged and dropped from the blue zone into the space below. These blocks are small application that are used to extract particular information and add them to the already built profile. Given their specialisation these blocks may be used to bring into the views different media content like videos, images, feeds, etc. All this added information via drag&drop and configured properly make what we understand as being a view. On this phase you are building the main view associated to the completed profile but as you will see many more views may be built each and every one aimed to serve different presentation purposes. Following different blocks will be presented with their own characteristics and a few details of their configuration.

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Illustration 17: Building blocks of the view Blocks to build associated views to the personal profile: This block will bring content of one particular blog that is selected. You may pick up a different title for the blog or just leave it like it is. Confirm the choice with Save. Blog

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This block allows you to put separate blog postings belonging to one blog or many.

Blog post

Recent blog posts

This bloc allows inserting the newest posts from a blog. What makes the difference from the other two options is that it presents you with three options (More options) that will help you to control how information is conveyed to other's views when those are allowed to copy content from yours: Skip this block entirely when copying the view, will take out blog postings at the moment an user is copying the view. Others may display your Blog in their view does exactly what it says Others will get their own copy of your Blog does exactly what it says

This block allows you to include a news feed in the view. Take into consideration option Show feed items in full, as this allows the articles taken from the feed to be included as External feed full text as long as the provenance site is set to offer them as such.

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You may incorporate video sequences from dedicated web services. Of course you may set the width and height of the video frame to adjust it to your content needs. External video

File(s) to download

You may incorporate in a view files already loaded in Files section. You must be very careful because if you are also an administrator or member to many other groups, you will have access to their files also and it is possible to put sensible files that shouldn't be presented to those for whom you build the view. Be very careful in this matter!

Puts into the view a whole folder to be accessed. The same advertisement is in force concerning file content and who may see them. A folder

Displays an HTML file that is already loaded into Files section. In this respect larger content may be given but the only problem is that images should be loaded from an external Some HTML source. It doesn't take the images from the

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same folder.

An image

Inserts in the view an image that has been already loaded in the Files. As it is seen in the picture you have access to all the file images from all the groups you are member (marked in the image with different colours). Please, take care to the restrictions and sensible materials not to be mistakenly inserted into the view. Ticking Show description will also put the description of the image that already exists. You may insert a new Width to resize the image. This is very useful when you have large images that you would like to adjust to your content needs. If a new value is not given, the image stays at its original size.

With this block you may insert video sequences in flv (flash video) format or mp4. Please do not exceed 7MB in size. The file should be first loaded in Files into a folder named for convenience media. Embedded media

Text box

This block allows putting text and image into the view. In order to insert images and links from external sites you may extend the editor panel clicking on the small blue screen icon (see the image attached). The images needed to be inserted should be first opened clicking on them from the Files section and afterwards clicking the image icon and inserting the link. From the same panel you may control how the image is shown (size and alignment). When you have finished this step, just close the full screen editing clicking on Close button of the window.

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This bloc takes already existing information from Contact information section and shows them in the view. Contact information

Inserts a dedicated space where all your friends show up.

My friends Inserts the groups you belong to.

My groups Inserts a list with the existing views in My portfolio – My views

My views Inserts information about yourself from My profile section. You will be offered a set of options just as in the case of Contact information regarding how artefacts will be shown. Profile information Wall

This block puts in a dynamic field that allows your friends to send you public or private messages. This block allows your Curriculum Vitae to be put in the view

Your entire resume This block allows selection of certain parts of the artefacts that are part of the Curriculum Vitae.

One resume field

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Step 7 - Personalised views I have mentioned before that views may be built in order to be adapted to different contexts and communicational and presentational needs. These views could be built from section My portfolio – My views. Anatomy of one view We will start from an already built view that will serve as analysis model:

Illustration 18: Anatomy of a view As I was saying, a view is an aggregation of many artefacts as it is seen from area 2 in the illustration above. What the fellow colleagues will see looks like a web page with information concerning professional and personal details:

Illustration 19: View seen by the others As it is seen in illustration 19, there are three interest areas concerning a view: – Editing the details regarding the view (Edit view details) – Editing view's content (Edit this view) and – Setting who can get to this view (Edit View access) At this moment an accent should be taken into editing the content of the view and also establishing the access levels for the community members and friends.

Illustration 20: Edit individual blocks Things look quite good in content editing and building the view as we based our efforts on the previous steps. You should be focused on another important aspect concerning granularity of access. On short 19

who is seeing what?

Illustration 21: Setting who gets access to what We will review one by one following the areas marked on the illustration 21: Area 1 Ticking Allow copying will allow all those accessing the view to be able to copy it. Be very, very careful as all the files included in the view may could be copied also. Also pay attention to the copyright issues for all the materials included in the view. Area 2 This area allows three types of access to the view: – public – could be seen from the outside, – logged in users – network friends 20

All these access policies are backed up by a counter that has the role to set up the time for a view's existence. Setting the start date but not mentioning the end date makes the view visible for an indefinite period of time. These settings could be tweaked in area 3. Also in this area the secret link is displayed (this link could be sent to all those friends that are not members of the community and is a direct access to your profile). Also in area 3 friends may be added to share a view with them. Area 4 Here you may override the settings for all the views regardless of the settings previously done to individual level of access. Now, we have to stress the fact that the views may be built in three different context: – build the main view, that attached to your profile and the most important one: Profile – Edit profile page – views built for different occasions or especially for particular groups My portfolio – My views – views built for a group in order to promote and illustrate the activities. Following a view build up you have the option to model the way this will be presented to the users accessing Change my view layout option under the block selection blue area

Illustration 22: Change my View Layout Clicking on this link you'll be lead to the first step when it comes to customise the looks of the view meaning the number of columns and how content will be distributed across. Options start from a single column up to five. Two or three are recommendable being the most efficient ones.

Illustration 23: Number of columns Pushing forward (Next) you'll be presented options concerning space distribution among columns.

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For two columns option you have three layouting profiles:

Illustration 24: 2 column options For three columns option you have three layouting profiles:

Illustration 25: 3 columns option To four columns option you have three layouting profiles:

Illustration 26: 4 columns option Before closing this step I have to say that from Settings section, Preferences you may set that at the margins of the columns to appear some control buttons designed to help you erase and manage with ease the columns. I do not recommend this option as it is very easy to erase a whole column of content. This is not a tragedy as all the content we know are artefacts, but it is time factor waisted. 22

Step 8 – Groups and forums After building a solid profile, the following step would be joining work groups already established. This may be achieved searching groups with Find groups where you may select All groups option and click on the search icon. At this moment all the groups will be shown that are set with the attribute Publicly Viewable Group. A few more details on how this works may be found on Step 3. What is our main concern at this moment is how a group is initiated and managed. The administrator initially sets how groups may be initiated and who has the authority to do that: – only the administrators (users having administrator attribution) – all community members. Our community is set so that any member may initiate a group (details on how this may be achieved you could find at Step 3). Group anatomy

Illustration 27: Group sections All the groups you are already a member appear on the right side of the site immediately the moment you authenticate. Here also on a short notice it is specified to which you are administrator.

As illustration 22 shows, a group has many different sections. About: introductory section meant to serve you generic information about the group like purpose, scope, etc. Also there are informations concerning how many members are in the group and also who 23

are de administrators. There is a short overview about how many views are built for this particular group and how many folders and files are being contributed.

The Files and Views sections are already covered and we should take a look at the Forums as here is in fact the kitchen of the group. This is the place where ideas are pushed around and debates are started concerning different issues. Also the forums may be used to spread news and initiate different topics on different thematics around a central subject may that be a project or a development direction. How a forum is structured? First we have to understand the basic structure: forum -» topics So, a New forum has the role to start a new directory of topics that you may initiate (New topic). For starters I recommend to think about the big debate subjects that will lead to a prolific debate on different topics that make the big subject. All these subjects will constitute, in fact, the forums. You have to take into consideration the fact that only the administrators of one group may initiate forums. The administrators are mentioned as Group admins as seen in illustration 28. Also, admins

Illustration 28: Forum details may edit the forums adding or modifying the general information for a specific forum or if necessity demands it to delete them. As you can see in the illustration you could assign moderators to a forum. They have extended rights on topics.

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Illustration 29: Topics structure As you can see from illustration 29, inside forums there is a familiar structure for all of you so I consider it is not necessary to get into details how to post a message or a reply.

Illustration 30: One of the topics What should be added is that all the members of a certain group may subscribe to a topic and they will be sent a notice when that particular topic has been changed or added replies. 25

Step 9 - Settings and messages We came to the end of this miniguide, but we shall not close it before telling you that there's a section from where you could make some customisations regarding personal account and the way you communicate with the other members.

Illustration 31: Setting preferences As you may see from illustration 31, Friends control allows you to set how the other members could add you as their friend: – nobody may add me as a friend – new friends require my authorisation – new friends are automatically authorised It is possible to set how you will receive the messages from the others. It is preferable to let all the members send you messages. Coming to messages, you should know that beside the fact you receive them on email, you could access them from Notifications (Settings section) – a place like an internal mailbox of the system (see illustration 32).

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Illustration 32: Notifications A very important aspect for correct identification of all members and for easy identification on which efficient collaboration is based, and also strengthening institutional ties, would be the possibility of expressing the affiliation to the institutions listed at Institution membership.

Illustration 33: Affiliation These institutions will be entered by administrator on member's request if there are not listed already. As you can see from illustration 33 a list presents all the institutions that already exist. Members may choose for one and they will confirm affiliation clicking on Send request.

FOR THE QUICK JUMPERS I have registered now what? Go fill some details → → About me, Contact information, Messaging, General → Profile icons (here put a picture and confirm ticking Default.

Where do I go to fill a profile? → important section of them all.

→ Fill my resume as this is the most

How do I join a group? → → → → Choose the one you are interested in from the list of public groups. Also if you are invited to a group that is not visible you will receive this 27

invitation in a mail or to the Messages inside the system.

How do I check my messages? →

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