Thoughts on LAMS conference
I was at the LAMS 07 conference in Greenwich last week. I was presenting about the learning design project at the OU, see slideshare presentation below. As well as giving an overview of the project, I raised a couple of points. The first of these was that there is a continuum at the heart of pedagogic planners, (ie tools that are aimed at helping educators plan activities), which goes from open to structured. Some users want help and to be stepped through, while others want to do what they want and only have the tool as a canvas on which they work. The second point was that learning design represents one node in the future learning world, which may be more or less significant at any given learning moment, but it does need to be one of the components. This is particularly true when you view content as miscellaneous, as I mentioned in an earlier post.
A couple of other things I noticed:
- Moodle was by far the most common VLE, and integrating LAMS with Moodle was one of the main areas of interest.
- The new version of LAMS has been built with an open architecture in mind. This required a complete rebuild, but it was necessary to survive. This reinforced the open API message.
