Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 87, 23rd Jun, 10

By: James Dalziel

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2010 European LAMS Conference - 3 weeks to go!

We're just 3 weeks away from the 2010 European LAMS and Learning Design Conference at Oxford University on July 15th, followed by a CETIS DesignBash on the 16th.

If you are planning to attend and haven't yet registered, could I ask you to please sign up asap - we are trying to finalise catering and need to get a best estimate based on registrations by next week.

I should note that so far registrations are a bit less than last year, so perhaps the financial climate is taking its toll, or maybe some people are running late with registering this year. Even if we have a smaller group than in the past, the quality of the people attending will no doubt make for a great event.

To register, please go to:
http://lams2010.lamsfoundation.org/registration.htm


LAMS Book to be launched at Cyprus LAMS Workshop

As I mentioned last newsletter, Leanne and I will be in Cyprus just before the European conference for a LAMS Workshop at the University of Nicosia organised by Chris Alexander and colleagues. As part of this event, Chris will be launching the new edited book about LAMS drawing on past conference papers and journal articles. I just a saw a picture of book today and it's looking great!

For those interested to see it, we should have some copies at the European LAMS Conference later that week.


e-Adventure game integration LAMS

When we rebuilt LAMS for Version 2 back in 2006, one of the key underlying features was a set of interfaces (the "LAMS Tools Contract") to allow software developers to build their own tools to integrate into LAMS - in other words, developers could create new tools for users to drag and drop into sequences and use with their students.

There have been many examples of this over the years, and some external tools are included in LAMS today, such as Google Maps and the Pixlr Image Editing tool.

For those who are interested in integrating Games into LAMS, a group in Spain is exploring this as part of their "e-Adventure" project. This includes passing data from the Game to LAMS, so in the future it would be possible to use data about student activities in the Game as a basis for Branching later on in a LAMS sequence. This is great work and I wish the team all the best as they continue their development. For an initial overview of e-Adventure work on LAMS, see
http://e-adventure.e-ucm.es/news.php?lang=en_en_utf8&number=102


LAMS for Medical Education

We've recently had a grant from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council to explore the use of LAMS in Medical Education. The focus was online training for later year medical students in the scientific basis of medicine.

LAMS was used to allow students to access materials and collaborate online even though students were in different hospitals at different times. As compared to a traditional LMS approach, students found the step by step process of a LAMS sequence to be very useful.

As the project draws to a close later this year, the team, led by Bronwen Dalziel, will be sharing some of the sequences they developed. The first of these is now available, and watch out for others from Bronwen over the coming months. See
http://www.lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/sequence?seq_id=1057905

Posted by James Dalziel