Glossary of common terms

Established in 2006, Mahara is the result of a 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.

Released in Feb 2007 Mahara is a fully featured electronic portfolio, weblog, resume builder and social networking system, connecting users and creating online communities.

Mahara is designed to provide users with the tools to demonstrate their learning, skills and development over time to selected audiences.

Meaning `think' or `thought' in Te Reo Maori, the name reflects the project's dedication to creating a user-centred life-long learning and development application as well as the belief that technology solutions cannot be developed outside the considerations of pedagogy and policy.

Mahara is provided freely as Open Source software (under the GNU General Public License). In brief, this means that you are allowed to copy, use and modify Mahara provided you agree to; provide the source code to others; not modify or remove the original license and copyrights, and apply this same license to any derivative work.

For further information please see https://eduforge.org/projects/mahara/ and http://mahara.org

In My (Humble|Honest) Opinion

Moodle App Plans are functionality levels for the official mobile app. The available plans are Free, Pro and Premium. You can learn more about them at apps.moodle.com and join the discussion in the forum here.

Dashboard is a customisable page in Moodle that provides users with links to their courses and activities within them, such as unread forum posts and upcoming assignments.

See the documentation Dashboard for more details.

Internet Information Services - Microsoft's answer to Apache. This is software, that, when installed on a machine, provides a web service. Just like Apache, IIS listens to port 80 and answers any http requests from client machines.

Constructionist learning is inspired by the constructivist theory that individual learners construct mental models to understand the world around them. However, constructionism holds that learning can happen most effectively when people are also active in making tangible objects in the real world. In this sense, constructionism is connected with experiential learning, and builds on Jean Piaget's epistemological theory of constructivism.

Seymour Papert defined constructionism in a proposal to the National Science Foundation entitled Constructionism: A New Opportunity for Elementary Science Education as follows: "The word constructionism is a mnemonic for two aspects of the theory of science education underlying this project. From constructivist theories of psychology we take a view of learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product."

Source: Wikipedia.org