Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 74, 11th Feb, 09

By: James Dalziel

[ Forward ]

2009 - An exciting year for LAMS

Welcome to the first LAMS newsletter for 2009. This will be an exciting year for LAMS - some of the highlights will be:

(1) Release of the LAMS Activity Planner: This new system provides educators with advice on choosing a pre-built template to suit their needs, as well as a simple "single-page" editor for adding or tweaking the content in a template. For an early animated mockup, see
http://saturn.melcoe.mq.edu.au/jly/Ped_planner.htm
The LAMS Activity Planner will also include features for expert designers to create their own templates and planners for others to use! We plan to provide the LAMS Activity Planner as a free hosted service, and hope to make it available within the next few months.

(2) Free "single class" LAMS hosting: Many individual educators have told us they'd love to trial LAMS with one of their classes, but they are unable to persuade their technical staff to install a LAMS server at their institution. So to help educators gets started with LAMS, we plan to provide a free hosting site where individual educators can get access to LAMS - including student accounts for one class (up to 30 students). If there is heavy demand on this service we may need to limit new users, but we're keen to try it and see how it goes. We plan to offer this within the next few months.

Best of all, this will be integrated with the LAMS Activity Planner so educators who are new to LAMS can browse and select a template, tweak its content (if needed), and then immediately run it with their students from the same website.

(3) New Versions of LAMS: We expect to release LAMS V2.3 in July and V2.4 in December. These new versions of LAMS will have many powerful new features and great tools. For V2.3, we'll have an image gallery and a new image editing tool, as well as system wide features like instant messaging and "support" activities (supporting activities that accompany a sequence, but are not inside the sequence structure, so can be done at any time, or not at all). For details, see
http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lams/Roadmap#Roadmap-LAMSv2.3

(4) Deep Tools integration with Moodle: Following on from our initial integration of a Moodle Forum into the LAMS authoring and run-time system, we now have 10 Moodle tools running inside LAMS (many thanks to Marina Rodríguez Aliberas from La Salle Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona, Spain for her work on this). This means you can use Moodle as your LMS, then use LAMS to sequence Moodle (and LAMS) tools for structured lesson plans. If you only want to use Moodle Tools, you can switch off the LAMS tools, which means you get all the familiarity of Moodle Tools, but they can function inside the powerful LAMS sequencing framework. We're also interested to implement this approach with other LMSs. For details on the Moodle integration, see
http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lams/Moodle+Tool+Adapter

(5) Two LAMS Conferences & a Schools Showcase: The 2009 European LAMS & Learning Design Conference will be held on July 6-9th at the Open University in the UK (details below), and the 4th International LAMS & Learning Design conference will be held in Sydney on December 3-4th (initial details at http://lams2009sydney.lamsfoundation.org/ ). We're also having a LAMS Schools showcase in Sydney on June 17th (more details below).

(6) Australian Schools rollout of LAMS: We hope to work with many schools in Australia this year to help them adopt LAMS to complement the Australian Government's "Digital Education Revolution" - please let us know if you're interested to work with us!

So... a big year ahead. I'd like to recognise the many people who help make LAMS possible - the great team at MELCOE, Macquarie University, the 91 translators of LAMS, the many teachers and technical experts who contribute to the LAMS Community, and all the educators and students who use LAMS and provide us with feedback and encouragement - my deepest thanks!


2009 European LAMS Conference - Website & Call for Papers/Presentations

The 2009 European LAMS & Learning Design Conference, together with a Pedagogic Planner summit, a CETIS "Design Bash" and LAMS Training workshops will be held 6-9th July 2009 at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. The conference website is now up - see:
http://lams2009.lamsfoundation.org/

The Call for Papers and Presentations is now open - submissions are due by 23rd of March, 2009 - for details, see:
http://lams2009.lamsfoundation.org/papers.htm


LAMS Schools Showcase - June 17th, Macquarie University, Sydney

Following feedback from past LAMS conferences, we're hosting a dedicated LAMS Schools Showcase this year on June 17th at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. This showcase is for teachers to demonstrate their use of LAMS and share ideas with fellow teachers in a relaxed atmosphere. We'll also provide LAMS Training workshops on June 18th. For details, see
http://showcase2009.lamsfoundation.org/


Diana Laurillard article on 3rd International LAMS Conference

Diana Laurillard has written an article for the ALT Newsletter on the 3rd International LAMS and Learning Design Conference held in Sydney in December 2008. This article provides a great overview of the conference and its themes, as well as Diana's reflections on LAMS, Learning Design and next steps for this field of research. See:
http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/e_article001319947.cfm?x=b11,0,w


Special Issue of TEwT Journal on LAMS & Learning Design - Call for Papers

Reminder - The Journal of Teaching English with Technology (TEwT) invites you to submit articles for a special edition on LAMS and Learning Design. The Journal is interested in all theoretical and practical articles (in any subject area) that help to draw light on some of the key threads in current LAMS and Learning Design literature. The Journal will also consider republication of articles or revised versions of articles that have appeared in past LAMS conferences. As the Journal's special issue principally aims to offer a venue for the facilitation of academic discussion on LAMS/Learning Design, an open access approach will be adopted: authors of articles will be able to freely post their articles on other Internet sites if they so wish. Deadline for submission is April 1st 2009.

For more information email Chris Alexander alexander.c@unic.ac.cy or see
http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/educationalcommunity/lamsresearchdevelopment/forums/message-view?message_id=686304

Chris Alexander has also recently uploaded a great new sequence to help students prepare for giving a presentation in class (especially for English language training contexts) - it's available at:
http://www.lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/sequence?seq_id=720285


News Item on LAMS Partnership with Nanyang Technological University

I was very pleased to announce the new partnership between LAMS International and Nanyang Technological University at the LAMS conference in December, and I included a press release for this in my last newsletter. For another news item on this announcement, see:
http://www.genengnews.com/news/bnitem.aspx?name=47364828

Posted by James Dalziel