Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 76, 15th Apr, 09


 
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1: Newsletter 76, 15th Apr, 09
04/15/09 01:22 AM
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LAMS Activity Planner beta

The LAMS Activity Planner is a new layer on top of LAMS that provides pre-built templates to help teachers rapidly build quality e-learning activities. It provides advice on choosing effective approaches, as well as sample sequences and advice on editing individual tasks. Teachers can use the LAMS Activity Planner to easily adopt and customise powerful teaching strategies in less than 10 minutes.

The LAMS Activity Planner is now ready for beta testing - that is, the system still has some bugs and rough edges, but is ready for exploration by those who'd like to try out an early version and provide feedback. For more information and a screencast with voiceover, see
http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/planner/

Going further, expert designers will be able to create *their own* planners (that is, their own templates and advice process) to support teachers in their educational contexts. To build your a planner in the LAMS Activity Planner involves just simple text editing (to create the decision process) and LAMS Authoring (to create templates) - no special technical skills are required. See website for a screencast about creating a planner.

For me, the LAMS Activity Planner is one of the most important developments in the 7 year history of LAMS - it's up there with the release of LAMS itself and the launch of the LAMS Community. I hope it will bring the benefits of Learning Design to a broader audience of educators.


European LAMS Conference Program & Registration available

The Program is now available - see http://lams2009.lamsfoundation.org/program.htm

We have an outstanding program on Learning Design and LAMS - so this will be an excellent opportunity to hear the state of the art. We have presentations from Diana Laurillard, Phillipa Levy, Helen Beetham, Tom Boyle, Dai Griffiths, GrĂ¡inne Conole and OU LD colleagues, Sarah Knight, Patrick McAndrew, Martin Weller, Christine Ferraris and LDL colleagues, Christopher Alexander, Susanne Neumann, Spyros Papadakis and colleagues and others, including my MELCOE colleagues Leanne Cameron and Ernie Ghiglione.

Registration is also now open - see http://lams2009.lamsfoundation.org/registration.htm

The 2009 European LAMS & Learning Design Conference is on July 7th at the Open University, UK. There is a Pedagogic Planner meeting on the 6th, a Design Bash on the 8th, and Training workshops on the 8th and 9th (NB: Training on the 6th has been moved to combine with the session on the 9th due to workshop presenter availability). For all details, see http://lams2009.lamsfoundation.org/


LAMS V2.3 update

The V2.3 release of LAMS is due by the middle of the year. In addition to many excellent new tools and features, V2.3 has amazing improvements in performance - compared to V2.2, it is 3 times faster and uses one quarter of the memory.

For full details on the new features and technical update, see
http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/technicalcommunity/forums/message-view?message_id=764646

We're running ahead of schedule (!!), so we're putting extra time into testing LAMS V2.3. I'm keen to get more teachers involved in the testing process (not just tech people), so if you're a teacher who is an experienced LAMS user (but not a "techie") and would like to help us with testing V2.3, we're devoting a special section of the LAMS Community forums to give advice on how to help with testing and where you can post your feedback - see
http://lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/technicalcommunity/forums/message-view?message_id=771822


LAMS Community statistics update - Many new sequences

We've had a significant increase in the number of sequences in the LAMS Community - now over 400. Here are the statistics as at April 15th 2009:
Members: 4,302
Number of Sequences: 407
Sequences downloaded & previewed: 11,745 times
Forum Postings: 4,388
Translations to: 28 languages
- the latest translation to be added is Catalan. There is also a new Arabic Forum in the LAMS Community, in addition to the existing Italian, Spanish and Greek Forums.

Posted by James Dalziel

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