Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 19, 19th Mar, 06

By: James Dalziel

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1st International LAMS Conference - Sydney, December 7/8th 2006

I'm delighted to announce that the 1st International LAMS Conference will be held in Sydney, Australia on December 7th and 8th, 2006. The conference is open to all educators, developers, researchers and system administrators who are interested in LAMS and its role in transforming the future of education.

The conference will include keynote speakers, paper presentations, workshops and panel discussions - further details on getting involved (including a call for papers) will be announced soon. The conference will be held back to back with ASCILITE 2006 (which runs December 3-6th), making it an ideal opportunity for international visitors to attend both conferences. More details in upcoming newsletters - please make a note in your diary now!

Sakai Lead Architect visits LAMS

Sakai is a leading open source Learning Management System used by some of the top US universities. LAMS and Sakai announced integration of the systems in October 2005. During the past week, the lead architect of Sakai (Dr Charles Severance) visited the LAMS team at Macquarie University to explore the next generation of e-learning systems and the potential for deeper integration between systems like Sakai and LAMS.

One of the highlights of the discussion was a new conceptual architecture for how future activity tools will "plug into" a learning platform. At the heart of this new approach is the idea that in the future, any activity tools should ideally be capable of running in three different "modes", each with a pair of options:
(1) Stand-alone or sequenced
(2) Teacher/instructor-led or student-led
(3) Online or offline

You can think of this as a 2 x 2 x 2 cube of options.

To explain this, let's take a Discussion Forum as an example. In an ideal future, there would be many different ways you could use a Discussion Forum for learning. First, a Discussion Forum activity tool would be capable of running stand alone on a course page (such as for a whole class discussion that ran throughout a course), as well as running inside a sequence of activities (for discussion of the particular topic of that sequence).

Second, a Discussion Forum tool would be capable of being led by the teacher (in the style of today's LMS/LAMS systems), but also could be led by students. This would not merely be a course forum with a student leader, but rather you would have an area where any student could use any tool to create activities for one or more people - separate from the formal, teacher-led course area. The student leader would then invite others to join him/her for a task (and this task could be "stand alone", or a sequence of activities). In this student area, the teacher would only be able to see the student discussions if the student invited them - otherwise it would be a private student area (analogous to a student discussion over coffee or a meal).

Finally, a Discussion Forum tool would be capable of online as well as offline use. The key concept here is that person setting up the Forum provides instructions on what the task is about, how to discuss the topic, etc. When the tool is run "online" then these instructions are used to set up an online forum with the relevant people invited to access this. However, when the tool is run "offline", it doesn't create an online environment (it just creates an online placeholder indicating this task is run offline) - instead, it prints out paper-based instructions that can be used to help direct the face to face activity. The interesting dimenision here is that even in a course that is run mostly (or completely) "offline", you would still have a digital record of the activities (and their structure where this was relevant). This record could then easily be modified to use online (instead of offline) activities if desired; or in a different context, a mainly online course could easily be changed to an offline course.

The is much to unpack in this new view of the future of activity tools for learning platforms, but it has significant implications that go far beyond just e-learning. The next generation of LAMS already implements this approach to developing activity tools.

Online JISC Conference: Innovating e-Learning 2006

I'm one of the presenters in this upcoming online conference that will run from March 27th-31st. The conference is based around the three themes of:
* Designing for learning
* Learner experiences with e-learning
* Innovating e-Learning Practice

Of particular interest to the LAMS Community would be the Designing for learning stream, which includes a Keynote by Diana Laurillard in which she discusses her Conversational Framework in relation to Learning Design and LAMS.

The cost of participating in 50 pounds. For further details, and to register, see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=elp_conference06

Posted by James Dalziel