Forum Higher Ed & Training Forum: Wireless, mobile LAMS success

By: James Dalziel

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Today I gave a LAMS presentation at the London Knowledge Lab (part of the Institute of Education in London) at the invitation of Diana Laurillard (LKL is her new home since completing her work on the E-Strategy for DfES). The slides are attached.

I tried something new today that I haven't done before - I had LAMS running on my laptop, and I had a simple wireless router attached so that people in the audience could log on to my mini-wireless network, and then access LAMS running on my laptop (once I'd given out names and passwords). This meant I could build a LAMS sequence in authoring as part of my presentation (as I often do), but then when I ran it, everyone with a wireless laptop in the room was able to log in to my sequence as a learner, and then work through it. I also went through the sequence as a learner, so everyone could see the progress of the class on the projector screen via my learner view.

The good news is that it all worked well, and I felt it was a more engaging way to demonstrate LAMS than authoring a sequence and then having just me go through it as a solitary learner - I don't know how many times I've said in the past "this is where you'd see everyone's answers to the Q&A if we were doing this with a real class, but because it's just me here on my laptop, you can only see one answer". This time, we saw a range of real answers when we did a Q&A because the audience could connect live to my laptop over wireless, and participate in the sequence I had just authored.

As Diana noted later in discussion, this way of presenting LAMS is much more engaging than simply "showing" it from my laptop alone.

Before attempting this wireless demo, I needed the router to have been setup (this needed a DNS service on my laptop). However, once this was in place, it was quick and easy at LKL to plug the router in and started up LAMS and the DNS - I was ready to go in a matter of minutes. I think the participants found it simple too - they just needed to connect to my (non-secure) wireless network, enter the URL of my LAMS server, then use the LAMS names and password I gave out to log in (I put all this up on the whiteboard).

One limitation today was that I didn't have an internet connection for the router, so the group couldn't go out and browse the web. However, this is easily fixed if you organise a network connection for the router ahead of time.

So, I think this illustrates a new way of demonstrating LAMS which is pretty cool, and not too hard to organise. Going beyond conference demonstrations, you could also do this in a classroom, training room, etc - if you had LAMS on your laptop/desktop, a wireless router, and wireless computers/PDAs for your students, you could do full LAMS sessions without ever needing "official" network access or LAMS on an "official" central server. There are some downsides to this - the LAMS session ends when you turn off the router (so students can't come back later to continue the tasks, etc), but in contexts where you just want to do some one-off collaborative work, it would be fine.

For example, a freelance corporate trainer who works with various companies could have the LAMS + router setup in their box of tricks for corporate training sessions without having to go through all the usual problems of getting software installed officially at the client site - all you would need is that trainees bring their wireless laptop along. I think the freedom this wireless approach brings would be very helpful for freelance trainers.

P.S. The wireless router wasn't expensive - I used a Linksys Wireless-G 54Mbps Broadband router which cost about AUD$150.

Posted by James Dalziel