Forum Articles and Presentations about LAMS: Re: LAMS and learning patterns

By: James Dalziel

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Hi Jeff,

Let me comment on each question/issue in turn, based on my current thoughts (I can't guarantee these are the same as those when we wrote this article some time ago!). Apologies for the long response, but they are all great questions.


"what is unclear is the way in which good designs will emerge"

There are many ways we could see good learning designs emerge. They could arise from individual experts (or a panel) sitting down and formally deriving these designs from known educational theory and research. They could arise from individual educators trying different ideas in the classroom and refining them over time based on experience. They could arise from sharing of designs among educators through a community such as the LAMS community where collective feedback (either based on theory or implementation experiences) helps refine the shared designs. They could arise from instructional designers developing partially pre-structured templates which can then be easily completed by educators for specific topics (ie, LAMS Author Xpress or "pedagogic planner" style ideas). They could arise from commercial publishers who pre-build good designs for use by educators, perhaps accompanying a textbook. There will no doubt be other ways too!

In fact, I think all of the above will happen (I know of at least preliminary work for all examples I've mentioned above). The interesting question to me is which will be most successful and useful to the widest audience. This remains very much a live question.


"there are emergent patterns of use that may relate to design patterns"

I think it is already possible to see learning designs appearing in the LAMS Community repository which are derived from classroom practice and a "gut feel" for what works. I'm sure some of these do not arise (at least in any direct way) from specific theoretical approaches about how students learn - they just work. An interesting research question is to investigate how these "just work" sequences do relate to educational theory, and to talk to their designers about the extent to which any relationship between sequence and theory was (i) explicit during the design process, (ii) implicit (in that past educational training subconsciously influenced current design), or (iii) even a surprise to the designer (where little if any formal theory drove the development - rather it was "gut feel", "grassroots", "bottom up" style innovation).

For what it's worth, my own experience is mostly (ii) and probably a bit of (iii). However, we've getting ready to do some key work on pedagogic planners for LAMS V2, and in this case, there will probably be much more (i) involved.


"the aim is to capture good guidance and support (for) the development of new activties rather than an exact transfer of models.

This remains a really important question, and I personally feel as if we are only at the very beginning of understanding the issues here.

In one way, the details page about any sequence in the LAMS Community sequence repository is a start at this - although the Description information is generally about running that particular sequence, rather than the general ideas and goals behind it. You can see an early attempt at providing some additional background advice in my "Template: What is a [insert topic here]" sequence at http://www.lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/sequence?seq%5fid=16699
A similar situation applies to the LAMS International "Teacher's Guide" that accompanies each sequence in the commercial sequence library available under the LAMS eLC product.

More directly on the issue of guidance and support, each tool in LAMS V2 has two new fields under the new "Instructions" tab - Online instructions and Offline instructions. The idea here is for designers to include any comments to the teacher (not seen by students) about this activity. Now these could be comments on how to run the activity in class, but equally they could be more general comments on the reason for the activity, the assumptions behind the design of the sequence, recommendations for changes, background theory, etc. The offline instructions area plays the same role for "offline" activities (as every activity in LAMS V2 can be designated "online" or "offline"). You can also upload documents to accompany these two sets of instructions, so, for example, you could upload a Word document of the general pattern used to derive the activity/sequence, or an article from the research literature that provides background to your choices. For offline activities, you could upload instructions/worksheets (for either the teacher or students or both) for when an activity is run offline.

For some designers, this new feature of LAMS V2 (for every tool!) will be too heavy weight, and they'll leave it blank and assume you can make your own educated guesses about how and why each activity works the way it does. This is analogous to how experienced teacher deal with a typical short lesson plan. But the point is that you *can* now append this information if you wish. For more details on this, see the fifth item on the LAMS V2 features page - http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lams/LAMS+2.0+Feature+List


You say that back then what was/is missing from LAMS is a pedagogic wizard. Is this something you're currently working towards? And the ideal user would require "more pedagogic knowledge and technical understanding". Again, is this a concern for future development?

Yes, a pedagogic wizard or "pedagogic planner" (or LAMS Author Xpress in our internal discussions) now seems to us to be a very important dimension for LAMS V2. There is nothing public yet on this in LAMS V2 alpha or beta, but we plan to include somthing by October when the main V2 release comes out.

To get a feeling for some of my initial ideas about the structure of this, see slides 18-22 from http://www.lamsfoundation.org/CD/html/resources/presentations/LAMS.JISCeval.AstonUniConference.Jan05.ppt

There is also important work on this concept going on around the world, such as two JISC projects on pedagogic planners, the LearningMapr project and others.

The most important thing for me about a pedagogic planner is that the outcome of the process must be something you can immediately run that actually *does* what it describes. So if you go through a process that leads you to select a role play design which then needs you to configure:

Step 1 - intro text on topic;
Step 2 - setup of groups for role play;
Step 3 - background content on topic;
Step 4 - group discussion area for discussing how to prepare for main role play;
Step 5 - role play based on discussion area for everyone, with posters taking on different roles; and
Step 6 - group discussion area for debriefing about outcomes of role play, and possible followup resources.

-> then I want the pedagogic planner to:
(1) help you do this configuration easily (a single page with a set of forms to fill in and checkboxes - with the rest of the role play design's configuration pre-built - ie, built prior to its inclusion in the pedagogic planner), and
(2) run the configured design directly for you (eg, launch the appropriately configured discussion forums, groups, resources at the right moment with the right students).

Having a decision process for teachers to choose a good set of activities which spits out just a text description of those activities (not a runnable sequence file) is not enough for me. This will probably be the main difference between our work and other projects not using LAMS. As it turns out, building a decision process that spits out text descriptions is not too hard, but building a system that can directly run the selected design requires a whole LAMS-like system underneath, and this is no small job.

So LAMS V2 will have a basic pedagogic planner (including some sort of decision process and a set of partially preconfigured sequences with a single forms/checkboxes configuration page - along the lines of the slides above). But when Ernie and I were discussing this recently, we came up with what I think will be a major driving force for LAMS V2 pedagogic innovation - the idea that anyone can create their own pedagogic planner for LAMS (based on their own decision process and set of preconfigured sequences) and load this into their LAMS server to accompany (or replace) the basic "package" that comes by default from us. You could then have lots of these pedagogic planner "packages" (ie, decision process + partially preconfigured designs), and these packages themselves could be shared among LAMS servers (the October LAMS V2 authoring area will have two different parts - the existing "full" authoring area, and the new pedagogic planner area).

I find this an exciting vision for linking the pedagogical and technological potential of LAMS V2 via pedagogic planners. In the first instance, creating a pedagogic planner "package" will require a fair bit of technical knowledge and backend "hard-wiring", but in LAMS V2.1+, we'd ideally like to see a pedagogic planner "editor" that let you create these packages without needing to know the backend technology. What I've got in mind is an editor that lets you do two things:
(a) create your own decision path, including the text of the choices, and
(b) create your template sequences where you pre-set most of the features, but then designate certain features to be presented on the single forms/checkboxes page (see slide 22).

This editor will be an awful lot of work, but its ability to empower non-tech people (like me) to build their own pedagogic planner package (which could then be shared with others if desired) would be great. One day I'd like to see the decision part (a above) allow for even more advanced decision paths such as a search-based mapping function illustrated by LearningMapR) - if you haven't seen this in action, check out the great demo + voiceover at http://lt3.uwaterloo.ca/innovation/lmr/lmr.html


While we're at it (sorry for bombarding you with questions but it's very helpful to get a sense of the direction you see LAMS heading now that's it's really taking off in a big way), how far off do you see version 2+ with sequence branching in the interface?

You can see some ideas about how this could work on slides 16 and 17 of the same presentation mentioned above.

The technical infrastructure to make this possible is now in place in LAMS V2, but I don't expect we'll have this ready for educators to use until V2.1. We don't have a specific date for V2.1 at the moment, but ideally we'd like to see it out during the first half of 2007. Another major feature I'd love to see in V2.1 is "edit-on-the-fly" (again, V2 makes this possible), so we'll just have to see how development pans out post V2.0 production release in October. We will also have this pedagogic planner editor thing to build, so we'll be busy as usual....

However, I can say that I've had informal news that we've received significant funding for work on the core technology behind LAMS as it applies to eResearch workflows. More about this will come out soon, but this work also requires branching (and edit on the fly), so I anticipate we'll make significant progress in this general area over the coming 12 months, and this is likely to benefit LAMS indirectly.


Phew! Hope that helps. Happy to discuss this further if there is interest.

James

Posted by James Dalziel

By: Jeffrey Earp

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Hi James,
thanks for taking the time and trouble to answer my questions so exhaustively. It's very encouraging to hear that as LAMS develops its pedagogical potential is being enriched. I hope we get the chance to pick up these themes at the conference in December.
Ciao 4 now,
Jeff

Posted by Jeffrey Earp