Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 71, 29th Oct, 08


 
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1: Newsletter 71, 29th Oct, 08
10/28/08 08:46 PM
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LAMS Conference Program & Earlybird Registration

The Program for the 3rd International LAMS and Learning Design Conference in Sydney on December 5th is now available - see:
http://lams2008sydney.lamsfoundation.org/program.htm
I'm delighted at the range of presentation topics - school, university and medical implementations, Learning Design theory and a range of other areas will be covered. Presenters include Professor Diana Laurillard (Keynote), Professor Grainne Conole (OU UK) and Professor Ron Oliver (ECU) and many other great speakers. There will also be a special Keynote presentation/discussion with students to explore their perspectives on using LAMS.

As a reminder, the discount for Earlybird Registration closes on November 1st - for registration and further details, see:
http://lams2008sydney.lamsfoundation.org/registration.htm


Catch up with Martin Dougiamas from Moodle

I was in Perth yesterday, and had a chance to catch up with Martin Dougiamas, leader of Moodle. As always when we catch each other among our busy travel schedules, we had a great time discussing similar ideas on the future of e-learning, Moodle and LAMS. In particular, the LAMS team is working on integrating all Moodle tools into LAMS so that it will be possible to use LAMS inside Moodle with just Moodle tools (which avoids the "tools duplication" problem). The LAMS team will be sharing this work with Martin to help inform any new functions needed inside Moodle to make this integration as seamless as possible. While there is still quite a bit of work to do, this is a very promising area for the future, and my thanks to Martin for his interest in working on this with us. For information about Moodle tools integration with LAMS to date, see:
http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lams/Moodle+Tool+Adapter


Open Education Workshop at Macquarie - November 21st

As part of our related ASK-OSS project, Macquarie University is hosting a workshop on Open Education on November 21st. The workshop will explore Open Education issues in university and school contexts. There is no cost to attend the workshop, but places are limited, so for details and registration, see
http://www.ask-oss.mq.edu.au/


Upcoming features for LAMS 2.2 - Text-based Conditions

One of the new features in the upcoming LAMS 2.2 release is text-based conditions - this means you could create, say, a Branching condition based on whether students said a particular word or phrase in their text postings to tools like Q&A, Chat and Forum. For further details, see:
http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lamsdocs/2008/10/24/New+Text-Based+Conditions+for+Activities


New Sequences - including in Spanish!

There have been many new sequences added recently, especially in the Public and K-12 areas, so if you haven't browsed the LAMS sequence repository for awhile, I'd encourage you to explore the new (and existing) sequences. The new Preview feature means you can immediately view the Learner experience for any sequence that interests you - and don't forget you can also add ratings and comments to sequences.

Also, we've had what I think is our first non-English language sequence added - an amazing Spanish sequence from Mexico about "The Day of the Dead" festival - see:
http://www.lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/sequence?seq%5fid=677146


RAMS update and integration with Grid workflow

Many of the new features in LAMS (Branching, Conditions, Task List tool, Tool integration, etc) have arisen from our parallel work on an eResearch version of LAMS called RAMS (with great thanks to the Australian Government for RAMS funding under Backing Australia's Ability).

For those interested in this area, we’ve recently integrated the RAMS workflow system (for collaborative research team workflows) with the Pegasus Grid Workflow engine. This was achieved using the RAMS(/LAMS) Tool Adaptor (which can also be used to integrate with other tools such as Google Maps, Moodle Forums, etc).

See link below for a brief animation showing integration of RAMS and Pegasus for authoring a combined Grid + collaboration workflow, and then running it. This is the first example I know of that traverses the boundary of Grid computational workflow with research team collaboration workflow.
http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/rams/Pegasus+Wink

Many thanks to Ewa Deelman and colleagues at USC for assistance, and to Yoichi Takayama, Ernie Ghiglione and Luke Foxton at MELCOE for work on this. General information about RAMS is available at http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/rams/Home

Posted by James Dalziel

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