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	1: LAMS and textbooks By: James Dalziel		11/05/05 09:44 PM	[ Reply \| Forward ]
I've recently had several interesting discussions with textbook publishers about the future of textbooks in general, and the integration of LAMS with textbooks in particular. I'm keen to hear what other LAMS Community members think about ways LAMS and textbooks could work together. One model is to have a set of LAMS sequences to accompany each chapter in a textbook, so that lecturers have some ready made activities that could be used in tutorials, or online, to accompany lectures. In another model, I imagine creating a new kind of textbook which is a hybrid of traditional textbook and accompanying workbook - and is complemented by integrated online LAMS collaborative tasks. In this version, you would have activities embedded in the textbook pages (questions to consider, voting tasks, reflective exercises, quiz questions, etc). These would then reference related online tasks in LAMS - so a student could read a section of a chapter (say on a train), write notes into the relevant questions in the book, then later go online and combine their notes in the book with collaborative online tasks such as debate and discussion. The idea is to make the textbook more like a personal journal/workbook, and for this to be closely integrated with online tasks (especially those involving collaboration with other students). The online tasks could be used to complement face to face lecturers and tutorials. For distance students, you could even use the online tasks as a way to simulate the tutorial experience. Look forward to your thoughts on these initial suggestions, and other ways you can see LAMS and textbooks working together. I have no doubt that in the medium term, the role (and appearance) of textbooks will change greatly - so it would be interesting to discuss how LAMS might transform textbook publishing. P.S. My example above is from higher education, but I'm just as keen to hear ideas about the role of textbooks and LAMS in K-12 schools and vocational training. Posted by James Dalziel

	2: Re: LAMS and textbooks By: Peter Miller	In response to 1	11/07/05 10:56 AM	[ Reply \| Forward ]
Another shout for TiddlyWiki in this context. If you recall, this is a Javascript-powered, serverless wiki that saves chunks of formatted text as so-called tiddlers. Students can save their own copy of the file and edit it. Nice features in this context include: 1. You can specify a default set of tiddlers to be displayed, e.g. without, perhaps, the tiddlers carrying definitions. 2. It's easy to generate a link in a tiddler that dynamically opens a definition tiddler. 3. Tiddlers can be tagged, e.g. all definition tiddlers could be tagged "definition". More abstruse content could be tagged "definition advanced". It's easy to generate popups listing, for example, all the definitions. (This feature is also built-in using the tabs in the right margin). 4. You can generate alternative views of the same TW, i.e. display another set of tiddlers, and TW can assign this set a permalink as an extended URL. One document, two or more views. 5. Students can edit text and add their own tags, e.g. "check_this" so they can recall specific subsets of tiddlers. 6. It is possible to date-stamp entries to generate a blog/journal view. Drawbacks? You can include links to external images but there is no infrastructure for packaging images with the TW file so you lose them offline. Some functions don't work on Opera but I think IE and Firefox are pretty well covered. More at http://www.tiddlywiki.com/. Posted by Peter Miller

	3: Re: LAMS and textbooks By: Gary Berosik	In response to 1	11/07/05 12:23 PM	[ Reply \| Forward ]
I teach two advanced software development courses in the Graduate Programs in Software program at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA. One of these courses is a capstone project course that covers rapidly changing best practices and technologies for software development. This rapid topic evolution requires an equally nimble choice of (web-based) readings and textbooks to effectively support the course material. I am trying to find the time to effectively apply the "build your own textbook" characteristics of the O'Reilly SafariU program to build effective reading materials for this course, but have not yet been able to do this. My reason for mentioning this is that it seems that such building/crafting capability for course readings and texts would also allow curriculum developers to very effectively weave specific readings with highly-directed, choreographed learning activities - in particular, activities developed and orchestrated with LAMS. I would be very interested in learning of others that have tried, or are trying similar "weavings". I am also interested in forming an active support group for those instructors that are interested in pursuing similar approaches, to share experiences and provide support to one another. :) -Gary Berosik gary.berosik@thomson.com Posted by Gary Berosik

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