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1: Newsletter 13, 18th Dec, 05
12/18/05 05:58 AM
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A Big Year for LAMS!

In this final newsletter for 2005 we review the highlights of the year and take a peak into what's to come in 2006.

February 2005 - LAMS released as open source software: Following the July 2004 announcement of plans to release LAMS as open source software, the source code was released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) in February 2005.

April 2005 - LAMS Open Source Launch: On April 13th, Macquarie University hosted a function to officially launch Open Source LAMS, including the release of an easy to use installer and a CD of resources about LAMS (available online at http://www.lamsfoundation.org/CD/ ). On behalf of the LAMS Foundation and Macquarie University, Vice Chancellor Prof Di Yerbury celebrated the release of OSS LAMS together with over one hundred guests from across Australia, New Zealand and as far as Wales!

September 2005 - LAMS Community Launched - the Birth of "Open Source Teaching": The LAMS Community was launched in late September as a home for discussion of the use of LAMS, and the sharing of LAMS sequences ("open source teaching"). The LAMS Community was built on the .LRN open source community system. To date, the LAMS Community has over 600 members from 75 different countries, over 70 sequences (that have been downloaded over 650 times), and over 500 discussion postings.

November 2005: New version, LMS integrations, services and Moodle Partnership announced: In a string of announcements, LAMS launched a new version (V1.0.2), integrations with Moodle, Blackboard and Sakai (and .LRN soon after), a suite of services and support services from LAMS International, and a partnership with Moodle through LAMS International joining the Moodle Partner network.

So.... a big year for LAMS! We'd like to end the year with the first of a series of announcements that will be central to LAMS in 2006 - LAMS V1.1.

LAMS V1.1 Developer Wiki now open

Since late 2004, the core LAMS R&D team have been working on a major redevelopment of LAMS (called V1.1) to address the many new features teachers have been asking for since 2003. During 2005, the redevelopment became a ground up rewrite - which had the advantage of allowing a completely new approach to all aspects of the architecture (but had the downside of taking longer to develop). While we already have V1.1 up and running in the lab, there is further work to be done to prepare it for a wider community of software developers, and for teachers and students.

One of the most important aspects of this new version is the "Tools Interface" - a new modular way of plugging activity tools into LAMS. This will significantly improve the ability of developers to create new/enhanced activity tools for LAMS.

LAMS V1.1 will be progressively released during 2006 - initially for software developers and testers, and then early adopters, and finally to all users. As with previous versions, it will be freely available as open source software under the GPL.

We are pleased to announce the first official step in this release - the opening of the LAMS V1.1 Developer Wiki. This Wiki is the home of all technical documentation on LAMS V1.1, and is the essential resource for software developers planning to work on LAMS V1.1. The Wiki is available at http://www.lamsfoundation.org/wiki/

Over the coming months we will be:
- releasing animations showing new LAMS V1.1 features in action (such as alternative languages to English, a rich text editor for all tools, portfolio export and many others)
- opening up CVS for developers to work with the LAMS V1.1 source code
- releasing beta versions for testing and use by early adopters, and finally
- release of the production (final) V1.1 of LAMS.

So for now, the good news is just for software developers who want to be involved in developing LAMS V1.1, starting with the release of technical information from the Wiki today, and opening CVS in early 2006. We expect that as the LAMS V1.1 architecture and core are released, future development of LAMS will become a community effort of both the core LAMS R&D team and interested developers around the world. As we release the beta and production versions of V1.1, teachers will start to benefit from all the hard work.

LAMS eLC for UK schools

LAMS International has been accredited by BECTA for eLC for UK schools. In January at the BETT Show in London, LAMS International will officially launch the LAMS eLC Sequence Library - for details, see http://www.lamsinternational.com/product/elc

Seasons Greetings

Merry Christmas and all the best for 2006. This newsletter will start again in mid-late January.

Posted by James Dalziel

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