Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 15, 19th Feb, 06


 
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1: Newsletter 15, 19th Feb, 06
02/19/06 05:15 AM
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1,000 downloads of LAMS sequences!

Congratulations to everyone from the LAMS Community - we've now had over 1,000 sequence downloads since we launched the site late last year! Thanks to all those who has helped make this possible.

If you haven't yet tried looking at someone else's sequence, we welcome you to give it a go. Before you start - you need:

(A) A LAMS account - if you don't yet have one, you can get a free trial account immediately from http://www.lamscommunity.org/testdrive
(B) A LAMS Community login - if you don't yet have one, you can get a free account immediately by clicking Register at http://www.lamscommunity.org/

Step by step guide to downloading LAMS sequences

(1) Choose a sequence from the LAMS sequence repository (viewable on the starting page in the LAMS Community after you login in) and click on the title to see the details.
-> (1a) Alternatively, you can browse through each community collection of sequences, or use the "Search" option to search across all available collections.

(2) To download a sequence, click on the "Download" button at the top right of the sequence details page. You'll then need to click Download again after viewing the relevant licence. This will download the sequence file to your Desktop.

(3) Now go to your LAMS account and open the Authoring environment, then click on the File menu (top left), and choose the "Import Sequence" option. This will bring up a screen that allows you to browse your desktop to choose the sequence you downloaded.

(4) Once imported, you'll see the sequence in your Authoring window. To see what a Learner would see, you can click Preview.

NB: Two things to watch out for - first, LAMS files have the format "sequencename.las", but occasionally this gets changed (eg, to "sequencename.las.htm"), in which case it won't upload. To fix this, just click on the file's name, and delete the ".htm". Second, the sequence download format doesn't include any files that were uploaded into the original sequence (eg, if you have a PDF article in your sequence). To solve this, you need to upload each relevant file within Share Resources once the sequence file itself is uploaded.

Introducing "Dolly" - Next Generation LAMS

During the week, London Knowledge Lab kindly hosted a workshop about the next generation of LAMS - LAMS V1.1 (also known as "Dolly") on Friday 17th February, 2006. The workshop was a great event, with over 50 people (many more than I expected!) finding out details from Ernie Ghiglione about Dolly, including extensive Q&A and discussion of both pedagogy and technical dimensions.

Ernie's slides (NB: large file - 3Meg) are available in PDF format at http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/technicalcommunity/forums/attach/go-to-attachment?object_id=149204&attachment_id=149206

In addition to topics previously mentioned, there were further details about using External tools (eg, a Moodle Forum) within a LAMS 1.1 sequence via the "External Tool Wrapper" - a way of integrating LAMS with external tools. Expect to see much more about this, and Dolly in general, over the coming months - for now, see the slides and http://www.lamsfoundation.org/wiki

Posted by James Dalziel

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