Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 94, 1st Mar, 10


 
You may request notification for Newsletter 94, 1st Mar, 10.
Search: 

1: Newsletter 94, 1st Mar, 10
02/28/11 11:04 PM
[ Forward ]
Asia Pacific LAMS Conference: Submission Deadline extended to March 15th

The 2011 Asia Pacific LAMS Conference will be held at NTU in Singapore on June 7th, with training workshops on the 6th. We've just extended the deadline for submission of papers or presentations to March 15th. For submission details see
http://lams2011.lamsfoundation.org/presentations.html

The conference is back-to-back with the E-learning Forum Asia 2011 on June 8-9th, and the submission deadline for this conference is also March 15th. For more details on E-learning Asia Forum, see
http://elfasia.org/elfa2011

The registration costs for the LAMS Conference are now up, with discounts for early birds, students, NTU/NIE staff (at student rate), groups and those attending both conferences - see
http://lams2011.lamsfoundation.org/registration.html


Special Journal Edition on LAMS and Learning Design

Following two successful special editions in 2009, Chris Alexander and colleagues have released a third special edition of the Teaching English with Technology journal on LAMS and Learning Design - see
http://www.tewtjournal.org/currentissuesfor2011.htm

This bumper edition of over 200 pages has fourteen articles and includes authors such as Diana Laurillard, Grainne Conole, Chris Alexander, Eva Dobozy, Rebecca Galley, Dejan Ljubojevic, Matt Bower, Jill Fresen, Karen Baskett, Chris Campbell, Spyros Papadakis, Muesser Natuk, Maria Kordaki, Antonio Castano and many others, including members of the LAMS team Leanne Cameron, Ernie Ghiglione and myself.

Congratulations to all the authors for these great contributions, and to Chris and colleagues for once again making this possible.


LessonLAMS.com Reminder

More and more people are trying out LessonLAMS.com, the new website for trying LAMS with up to 30 students for free. It also has access to the new "Simple Editor" feature from the Activity Planner, and teaching templates in the Planner area.

One great use of LessonLAMS is for teacher training courses, where trainees are exposed to LAMS within a course, but later on would like to try it with their own students - LessonLAMS allows them to set up their own site for students separate from their training course.

A paid option for groups with more than 30 students is coming - more details in the near future.


LAMS Releases and Patches

We generally provide only two LAMS software releases a year, often to coincide with our conferences. We have exciting news in the areas of mobile learning and scalability coming up for the next major release (due in June for the Asia Pacific LAMS conference) more details soon (iPhone/iPad/Android apps & support are coming....)

However, we fix small things in LAMS more frequently, and in the past administrators had to wait for the major releases to get these fixes. From now on, we'll have another option so that administrators can get the latest patches for LAMS in between major releases - these are available from our new "Patches" page - see
http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lams/Patches

These patches will be just for adding to the latest stable release, and all recent patches will be added into the next major release, so for most LAMS administrators it won't be necessary to worry about this - but if there is a particular bug that is annoying you that we've fixed, then you can get the patch for this without having to wait up to 6 months for the next major release.

NB: Patches are only for experienced administrators who understand the process behind using them, especially backing up your server before installation - just in case you hit an unexpected problem along the way!


Upcoming performance improvements - Clustering

For those of you who need to run very large LAMS instances (thousands of users at the same time), Ernie is working on improving the performance of LAMS when it is clustered across multiple servers. Initial investigations look excellent - more details soon. If you are interested in this area, please contact Ernie directly - ernieg@melcoe.mq.edu.au

Posted by James Dalziel

Post a Reply
Back to LAMS Newsletter