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Lams Foundation
Lams International
James Dalziel, from Macquarie ELearning Centre of Excellence(MELCOE), Macquarie University in Australia, began by noting that e-learning has thus far been too content centric. And it has looked very much like the transmission model of education.
New Field of Learning Design is emerging, and is being defined as a structured flow of tasks when can be captured, represented and shared. Learning then becomes about the activities of learners more than the content itself.
Four Interfaces/environments
Authoring
Monitoring
Administration
Learner
We saw a live demonstration with ten people from the audience with laptops on wireless. James showed us each of the interfaces. The International arm is a community website where learning designs can be shared. For example, Oxford University recently uploaded a whole set of learning designs for an introductory course. So their instructors developed these sequences of tasks and activities for learners and shared them, after polishing them.
You add your own context and content, but the scope and sequence of activities can be used to structure your teaching and can readily be customized.
I like this approach because it brings together visually the actual activities which will engage the learner and bring about enhanced learning and mastery of material.
I want to download and share this model of thinking about the activities that represent your learning environment.
Math and Statistics Journals Online
Project Euclid was created as a Mellon Foundation-supported initiative that utilizes mutually beneficial strategies to support both academic libraries and independent publishers of mathematics and statistics journals.
Problem: folks weren’t submitting to the repository. Why not? Speaker noted that part of the problem was the term “repository” which suggests by connotation that this is the “end” for this document, a resting place. Instead, the repository needs to be seen as a dynamic searchable database eager for more contributions. How to accomplish that?
DPubS: an open source electronic publishing system which now contains 35,000 articles. A small subscription-based service draws in the revenue that allows much of the material, 2/3, to be available free of charge.
Interface
They recently re-designed the User Interface (UI) so that you can house/host one of your own collections. You use the same engine but can give the repository the look and feel of your library or your organization. For example, Pennsylvania History
Positioning the tool
David Ruddy spoke about DPubS being viewed as an application layer on top of your own Institutional Repository. For example, the DPubS repository service functions as an API on top of Fedora or DSpace.
Merging question: what to do with the content available from conference proceedings.
Note: the group is eager for partners and beta testers.