Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 66, 23rd May, 08


 
You may request notification for Newsletter 66, 23rd May, 08.
Search: 

1: Newsletter 66, 23rd May, 08
05/22/08 09:27 PM
[ Forward ]
European LAMS Conference – Earlybird Registration closing soon!

The 2nd European LAMS Conference in Cadiz, Spain will be held from June 25th-27th, 2008 and has been timed to run just before the ED-MEDIA, ICICTE and ICALT Conference. We will be joined by many notable experts including: Stephen Downes, Gráinne Conole, Helen Beetham, Martin Weller, Barry Harper and Marion Manton.

We expect that during the conference there will be many opportunities to share lessons learnt, and examples of, approaches to Learning Design from all educational sectors. The focus of the conference will be on practical benefits of Learning Design. What are the challenges for individuals and organisations? Importantly, we want to capture the experience of those who have used LAMS (and similar approaches) and share some of the lessons learnt about learning design in higher education, the K-12 sector, vocational and professional education.

On Wednesday 25th of June, there are English-language LAMS training workshops and concurrently a day of Spanish-language presentations. On Thursday 26th, there is a full day of English-language presentations and a concurrent Spanish-language LAMS training workshop. On Friday 27th, there will be a meeting about Pedagogic/Activity Planners (in English) outlining the work currently being undertaken by a number of international projects, as well as further English and Spanish-language workshops. For full details of the Conference Program go to: http://lams2008.lamsfoundation.org/program.htm

Earlybird registration closes May 30th so register now for the conference at: http://lams2008.lamsfoundation.org/registration.htm
A Student Rate is available.

OLPC & LAMS

I had a great visit to OLPC in Boston a few months back, and since then the LAMS team have been working on testing LAMS on the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO. LAMS Learner works with both Flash and non-Flash enabled browsers on the XO, and Author and Monitor can also run on the XO with Flash. For pcitures of LAMS in action on the OLPC XO, see
http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lams/OLPC+XO

We're also working on a LAMS package that can easily be installed and run on the OLPC School Server ("XS") - more on this later in the year.

The Australian OLPC group has now launched. There is an OLPC TechFest on June 1st in Sydney, for details, see
http://www.olpc.org.au/2008/05/14/get-involved-at-the-first-olpc-australia-techfest/
Several members of the LAMS technical team will be attending.

CETIS IMS Learning Design workshop

CETIS in the UK recently hosted a workshop on the state of IMS Learning Design and related UK work. Details and slides are available at:
http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/LearningdesignMay08
Lisa Corley's reflections on the event are at:
http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lisa/2008/05/21/learning-design-%E2%80%93-revisited-reinvigorated-resurrected/

LAMS team in Europe in mid 08

Several key members of the LAMS team (Ernie, Leanne & I) will be in Europe around the middle of this year for the European LAMS Conference and other conferences/meetings around this time. In addition to LAMS, I'll be presenting at the Sakai conference in Paris & ED-MEDIA in Vienna, and I'm hoping to get to London on Monday 30th June to run an open LAMS workshop. Feel free to email us if you'd like to try to arrange a meeting.

Yet another LAMS 2.1 update...

We're down to final testing on LAMS 2.1 - it will be out in June before the European LAMS Conference. One unexpected benefit for the delay (all my fault) is that we've developed a new activity tool in time for inclusion in 2.1 - "Task List". This tool allows a teacher to give student a list of tasks to be completed (either online or offline), with extra features such as mandatory tasks, ordered tasks, uploading a document as part of task completion and many others.

Even more exciting is that Task List can be used for Branching (eg, students go down different branches depending on which tasks they have completed). To do this, we've included a new "Conditions" feature for this tool that allows authors to construct complex conditions based on different sets of completed tasks, and then these conditions can be used for Branching. It's hard to describe in words, so watch out for it when you get access to 2.1. Conditions will be rolled out to other tools in the future, so we look forward to your feedback on the Conditions concept as well as the new Task List tool.

Posted by James Dalziel

Post a Reply
Back to LAMS Newsletter