The LAMS Foundation annouced the launch of the LAMS user community website using .LRN.

"LAMS creates "digital lesson plans" that can be run online with students, as well as shared among teachers. The LAMS Community allows teachers to share and adapt digital lesson plans, and discuss their experiences of using LAMS." "The LAMS Community is central to our strategy of empowering teachers to transform education using the revolutionary digital lesson planning approach offered by LAMS. Educators can now freely and openly share 'best practice teaching' in a way never seen before in the history of education," said Professor James Dalziel, leader of LAMS. "We chose .LRN for its sophisticated community management functions, complementary feature set, and our shared open source philosophy," Dalziel said.

An interesting side note in the press release is the announcement of integration between LAMS and .LRN for course management similar to the integration of LAMS with Moodle.

John Norman, Director of the Cambridge University Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technology praised the LAMS/.LRN collaboration, saying, "Both .LRN and LAMS have set the pace in the development of collaborative/active learning platforms for higher education. This integration and co-operation between the two projects will create a powerful learning environment for students".

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The .LRN website recently added a host excellent video demos showing the functionality of .LRN.

Check it out!

http://dotlrn.org/demos-dotlrn/

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We've been hearing a lot of open source projects moving over to subversion in recent months. Projects like KDE and Wine have taken the leap and left CVS for good in exchange for the promise of Subversion. The promise of ... - atomic commits - versioning of directories - versioning in spite of renaming - familiar workflow - stellar Graphical User Interface (TortoiseSVN) It will not require a great deal of effort for users to move to subversion because workflow and syntax are almost identical to CVS. In addition to the compelling reasons already mentioned, using subversion repositories will also give us a choice to move to distributed version control using SVK (http://svk.elixus.org) if the need arises and if developers prefer to do so. Subversion is also easy to extend thanks to hook scripts where administrators can specify scripts to execute on specific events. For instance a post-commit hook script can run to send email notification or even update the bug tracker right after a commit. Keeping our repository up to date with OpenACS CVS will be a challenge. We are looking at a python script - Tailor.py (http://nautilus.homeip.net/~lele/projects/tailor/) to help us keep in sync. It will automatically retrieve the latest commits from OpenACS and commit them to a vendor branch in the Solution Grove repository where developers can pick which revisions can be merged to their respective projects. In addition, Tailor.py will also help us to contribute work back to OpenACS CVS direct from our subversion repository.

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A portfolio system, designed to work with dotLRN, has been developed by Nick Carroll of the University of Sydney. This weekend the demo site (www.dotfolio.org) was launched.

We have been getting a tremendous number of inquiries about portfolio systems and Solution Grove has already begun testing and development on dotFOLIO for a project funded by the State of Connecticut.

What is dotFOLIO?

The goal of the dotFOLIO project is to develop an open source e-portfolio application for the purpose of supporting personal learning and development. dotFOLIO can be used to construct a thoughtful collection of work and experience that leads to a desired outcome or educational goal. dotFOLIO will provide the functionality for this, as well as allow learners to preserve more knowledge over time and to forge richer connections between their academic and work endeavors.

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Two interesting stories about how the intranet is helping people connect.

The blog of the Astrodome Community Technology Center..providing internet access at the Astrodome - http://texasctcs.blogspot.com/

A online volunteer effort to create a comprehensive people finder database - http://192.122.183.218/wiki/index.php/PeopleFinderVolunteer

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