Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 58, 31st May, 07

By: James Dalziel

[ Forward ]

European LAMS Conference - Draft Program released; Workshops open

We've had a great response to the call for presentations for the 2007 European LAMS conference (thanks to all who submitted proposals!) and are pleased to announce that the Draft Program is now available - see http://www.lamsfoundation.org/lams2007/program.htm

There will be four strands to the conference - two general strands on Learning Design and LAMS, as well as a dedicated schools strand, and a technical strand. The conference runs from 8:45am to 5pm on July 5th at the University of Greenwich.

We've also provided more details of the LAMS V2 training workshops on July 6th and 7th - see http://www.lamsfoundation.org/lams2007/workshops.htm
The workshop on the 6th will be a general introduction to LAMS V2 for all audiences; while the workshop on the 7th (Sat) will cover the same ground, but with a focus on schools.

You can register for the conference *and now the workshops* at https://order.lamsinternational.com/lams2007/conf-select.php
NB: The workshops are limited to 15 places on each day - first come, first served.

The conference is being held in conjunction with the "Designing for Learning" conference at the University of Greenwich on the 4th of July - see http://web-dev-csc.gre.ac.uk/conference/conf32/index.php?p=246
If you are attending both conferences, your registration cost for the LAMS conference is discounted to 125 pounds.

RAMS beta released

RAMS (the Research Activity Management System) is based on the concepts of collaborative human workflow that are at the heart of LAMS, but is applied to eResearch (rather than eLearning) contexts. The beta release of RAMS is now out - you can sign up for a demo at http://demo.ramscommunity.org

At the moment, RAMS is mostly similar to LAMS, but one key new feature is "Live Edit" - the ability to edit a sequence "on the fly". This feature will eventually appear in the next release of LAMS (2.0.3, due in the next week or two), but if you can't wait to learn more, see the animation explaining this new feature at
http://saturn.melcoe.mq.edu.au/lams2/docs/winks/live-edit.html

Another difference in RAMS is that all Participants (ie, Learners) in a sequence are normally assumed to also be Monitors - so anyone in a research group can monitor and adapt the flow of the collaborative activities (however, this can be disabled if desired).

For technical details on Live Edit (and the rest of RAMS), see http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/rams/Live+Edit

New to the LAMS Community - Healthcare and Greek Forum

We've just launched our third non-English speaking forum within the LAMS Community - welcome to our Greek-speaking colleagues! They join the existing Italian and Spanish forums within the Non-English Speaking Community area. The Greek forum is at
http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/nonenglishspeakingcommunity/forums/forum-view?forum_id=428641

We also recently launched a Healthcare community to provide a dedicated space for discussion of Healthcare issues for Learning Design and LAMS. Some initial discussion is considering ways of using LAMS for Problem Based Learning (PBL) - we welcome your comments at
http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/healthcare/forums/message-view?message%5fid=422640

Recent Blog discussion of Learning Design and Open Source Teaching

I've just completed a blog post and discussion with Ken Udas from Penn State University about Learning Design and the concept of "Open Source Teaching". I've posted quite long comments on topics as varied as licensing of Learning Designs, possible reasons for the slow adoption of Learning Design to date (especially in the US), standards for Learning Design and other topics. See
http://blog.worldcampus.psu.edu/index.php/2007/05/16/learning-design-and-open-source-teaching/

The discussion on the blog is now finished, but I'm happy to continue discussing any of the issues raised here - see
http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/educationalcommunity/highered/forums/message-view?message%5fid=423988

Unix installer now available for LAMS V2.0.2

We've had the Windows installer for LAMS V2.0.2 out for awhile, but now the Unix/Linux installer has been released (including how to compile from source code) - see
http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/technicalcommunity/forums/message-view?message%5fid=422642

LAMS Community Statistics update

We've had a significant number of new sequences come in to the LAMS Community in the past month (thanks to all contributors, especially students!), so here's the latest stats on how we're doing:

Users: 2266
Number of Sequences: 191
Sequences downloaded: 5382 times
Forum Postings: 2912
Translations to: 23 languages

So only 9 more sequences to be shared before we hit 200! I'm sure readers of this newsletter have at least this number already out there waiting to be shared, so can I encourage you to take a couple of minutes to upload your sequences - they are a benefit to everyone!

Posted by James Dalziel