Forum LAMS for Tech-Heads - General Forum: Re: Re: LAMS 1.1 Workshop Presentation in London

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Peter,

> 1. Is BlackBoard ever likely to figure as the subject of an
> External Tool Wrapper? (yes, we're a Bb shop here)

The tool wrappers will require Blackboard to modify some of their tool slightly. It's a tiny modification, but those are needed to communicate between both systems.

Since Blackboard is a propriety application, we are not able to modify their code.

Judging for the little to no support we've got from Blackboard, at the moment, any modifications or work together towards a better integrations seems unlikely.

> 2. Let's suppose I wanted to develop a simple concept
> mapping tool to run under LAMS, what's the skill set
> required? Flash for the UI, Java for the server? Anything
> else? Will you be providing code for a get-you-started toy
> tool?

The beauty of the new tool contract is that you don't need to know anything about Flash. All the authoring content for a tool now is done in HTML pages (when you double click on an activity in Authoring, instead of popping up a Flash screen, we now popup the tools JSP/HTML page to author its content).

Yes, we will provide a template for developers as guidance. We just need a bit more time to do this, but it'll be there.


> 3. Where did the "Future of LAMS" part of the talk go to?

We had an interesting discussion about the features we would like to have in the future versions of LAMS (1.2, 1.3, etc). Some of those included complicated dataflows, conditional branches, loops, etc.

> 4. Wht are you going to do when you run out of names of
> famous sheep?

Well, we were thinking of writing to the Pixar fellows so they can come with a new cartoon movie. Maybe a Smurfs-like cartoon based on a flock of sheep so we get lots of new charaters to choose from

Actually, now that I think about it, that's what the Debian people did!

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione