Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 24, 23rd Apr, 06

By: James Dalziel

[ Forward ]

Farewell (but not goodbye) to Donna Gibbs

Associate Professor Donna Gibbs has just retired from Macquarie University, and although I'm sure we'll continue to hear from her, I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to her contribution to LAMS.

Donna worked with me in the very early days to create the "What is Greatness?" use case that formed the basis of much of the early development. LAMS wouldn't be what it is today without Donna's thoughtful and patient reflections on technology and education, and our weekly discussions through much of 2002. Donna, on behalf of all LAMS users, our thanks!

Robyn Philip has just completed an interview with Donna about her role in LAMS - to learn more, visit http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/educationalcommunity/highered/forums/message-view?message%5fid=208271

Praise for LAMS from Mark Shuttleworth

Over the past few months I've had the pleasure of getting to know Mark Shuttleworth. Mark was a highly successful dot com entrepreneur who sold his company Thawte to Verisign during the boom. Since then, Mark has been as astronaut (he was the first African in space), the founder of Ubuntu (a very popular Linux distribution) and a range of projects including those of the Shuttleworth Foundation.

Mark has been a big fan of LAMS since he first saw it a few months ago during a trip to Australia. After I caught up with Mark in London before Easter, he posted a great piece about LAMS on his blog - see http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/27

I'm working with Mark on two projects - the first is getting LAMS into Edubuntu (an education focussed distribution of Ubuntu). Second, Mark and the team at the Shuttleworth Foundation are developing a major project to rethink school education about analysis and problem solving skills using computers as a driver - and we're exploring how LAMS could help this initiative. For more details, see http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/26

New Presentations and Articles about LAMS

I've posted two new presentations from the recent Oxford Open Source conference to the Articles & Presentations forum of the R&D community - one is a general discussion of sustainability issues for open source in education and the other reflects on the highs and lows of going open source with LAMS - see http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/educationalcommunity/lamsresearchdevelopment/forums/message-view?message%5fid=208066

I've also posted two new short articles on LAMS in preparation for the ICALT conference in the Netherlands in early July - one is about issues with the IMS Learning Design specification and the other explores modelling of a school Astronomy game - see http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/educationalcommunity/lamsresearchdevelopment/forums/message-view?message%5fid=211547

LAMS Animations now in Italian

In past newsletters I've mentioned the great new animations ("Winks") of how to use LAMS. Now there are Italian versions of these - you can view both English and Italian animations at http://www.lamsinternational.com/documents/1.0/winks/

These animations are licensed under Creative Commons (by-sa), so anyone is welcome to use them to create their own versions (such as a translation). Many thanks to our Italian colleagues for taking the time to put these together.

Posted by James Dalziel