Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 77, 15th May, 09

By: James Dalziel

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LAMS wins Gold Awards at IMS Learning Impact Awards

I'm delighted to announce that LAMS won a Gold Award at the IMS Learning Impact Awards on May 13th in Barcelona, Spain. This award recognises the impact of LAMS and the LAMS Community as a significant innovation in teaching and learning against a competitive global field.

This award is only possible because of the amazing efforts of the LAMS team (past and present), so my great thanks to them, as well as to everyone from the LAMS Community who has helped contribute to the success of LAMS.

Congratulations also to all the other awardees - further details at:
http://www.imsglobal.org/pressreleases/pr090514.html


European LAMS Conference less than 2 months now

Just a reminder that the 2009 European LAMS & Learning Design conference is on July 7th at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, with related events on July 6, 8 & 9th - more details at:
http://lams2009.lamsfoundation.org/
Registration details at:
http://lams2009.lamsfoundation.org/registration.htm


LAMS V2.3 release due for May 22nd

The development and testing for LAMS V2.3 has gone well, and we now hope to release it on May 22nd (if everything goes according to plan!). V2.3 has many new features, new tools, as well as major improvements in speed and memory use - check out details at:
http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lams/Roadmap

Note that the LAMS Activity Planner isn't part of V2.3 - it's still under development (for details, see
http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/planner/Activity+Planner ), but also we see the LAMS Activity Planner as a separate layer from LAMS itself, and we're still working out our plans for its future. As mentioned in an earlier newsletter, we plan to host a free version of the Planner for interested users once it's ready!


So how big is the LAMS software?

I had several conversations at the IMS conference with people who knew of LAMS from the past, but hadn't realised its scale today. Apart from the thousands of users and 28 translations, another measure of scale (from a technical angle) is how many "lines of code" are inside LAMS - that is, how many lines of programming language make LAMS "happen". The current figure is 795,880 and according to the Ohloh website, this represents 215 years of work - see http://www.ohloh.net/p/lams

By way of comparison, the blog software "Wordpress" is only 121,435 lines of code (core only), and while it's a very crude metric, I thought I'd mention the size of LAMS to give people some idea of how big it is (and how long it would take to create from scratch!).

Posted by James Dalziel