Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 61, 11th Sep, 07

By: James Dalziel

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Blackboard Building Blocks and PowerLinks integration for LAMS V2

Today I gave a presentation at the Blackboard World Asia Pacific Conference on behalf of LAMS International to announce LAMS V2 integration via Building Blocks with Blackboard V7 (released last week) and via PowerLinks with CE 6 & Vista (due in the next few months).

The presentation also includes details of new LAMS International hosting and technical support packages to accompany these integrations - for details see
http://www.lamsinternational.com/bb

For the slides for the presentation, including screenshots for both Building Blocks and PowerLinks integrations, see
http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/educationalcommunity/lamsresearchdevelopment/forums/message-view?message%5fid=481049


LAMS Conference - Proposals due by next Monday, 17th September

The 2nd International LAMS Conference will be held at Macquarie University in Sydney on November 26th (followed by workshops 27-29th) - for details see
http://lams2007sydney.lamsfoundation.org/

The call for presentations/papers closes in just under a week on September 17th - we welcome presentations on LAMS or any other Learning Design related topics. For submission details, see
http://lams2007sydney.lamsfoundation.org/papers.htm


Feedback on "Open Education" ideas

In the next few days I'll be attending a meeting in Cape Town, South Africa about approaches to "Open Education" hosted by the Open Society Institute, Shuttleworth Foundation and Hewlett Foundation.

The hope is to work towards a declaration about the principles of open education that will be similar to the "Budapest Declaration" for Open Access (see
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml )

I'd welcome any feedback on Open Education ideas that you'd like me to take to this meeting - please email me (james@melcoe.mq.edu.au ). There are plans for a round of online discussions to follow the meeting that will be open to all.


Journal in LAMS V1 became Notebook in LAMS V2

One of the changes between LAMS V1 and LAMS V2 was that the tool for allowing students to record private reflections (that are not seen by other students) was renamed from Journal (in V1) to Notebook (in V2).

A new Notebook related feature in LAMS V2 is that a Notebook can be added to the end of any activity (see Advanced settings), so the old "Q&A + Journal" tool in LAMS V1 is now replaced with simply "Q&A", but with the Notebook setting (under the Advanced tab) enabled. The same applies to other V1 tools such as "Vote + Journal".

For some recent discussion of this change, see
http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/lamslounge/forums/message-view?message%5fid=476430

Posted by James Dalziel