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(photo by Dolly)

LAMS was very well recieved at the K-12 Open Minds conference in Indiana.  I think its hard to understand what LAMS does until a person has some experience with Moodle without LAMS.  There were lots of Moodle users at this conference.  My audiance was mostly Tech Directors and they felt that the teachers they were supporting were trying to do LAMS like sequences using Moodle alone and would really appreciate LAMS.

The State of Indiana is officially moving K-12 Education to Open Source so there was a lot of interest in LAMS as a mechanism for sharing lessons plan and helping to administration monitor where in the curriculum teachers were.

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(photo by LAMS tool Adaptor)

Ernie over at LAMS has been working on LAMS "Tool Adaptors".  These allow you to use the LMS, e.g. Moodle, .LRN, tools such as Forum, inside of LAMS with far more integration.

 Main page on Tool Adaptors: http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lams/Tool+Adapters

 The secret to understanding this is to go into the .LRN and Moodle pages and watch the vidoes of the Forums integration.

 But the real power and promise isn't in using Forums, its the concept of being able to integrate tools from the LMS in rich ways with LAMS.  That opens up a wide world of possiblities for creating customized solutions for learning.

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Our customers, and thier students, are often using a wiki for the first time on one of our sites.  I saw a great video on YouTube explaining the whys and hows of Wikis.

I also made a quick demo to show the features they go over in our wiki.  Try out the basics and then when you are ready to learn more check out this documentation: http://www.solutiongrove.com/docwiki/howtoxowiki

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(photo by RonAlmog of Flickr)

I am participating, in a non-credit capacity, in the massively online course Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. This is a great experiment to apply the ideas of connective knowledge to a course about the same topic. As a programmer, I enjoy the recursive nature of that. The course started this week. I am a little behind on my homework but I am catching up. My first task was to post an introduction on the Moodle forum for the course.

 Here is what I posted to the forums:

I am Dave Bauer from a small town outside Albany, New York. I am chief architect at Solution Grove, a company that provides online learning technology, among other things.

I have been interested in learning pretty much ever since I got online. I have followed a networked, hyperlinked path all around learning and learning technology, and hopefully this course will give me even more to think about, and help me organize me thinking.

This course will be a success for me if I can take what I have learned, and actually explain it to someone else!

I have actually followed a networked learning path to my current job. I was exploring online for ways to improve a retail web site I ran about 10 years ago. I discovered an online book,  Philip and Alex's Guide to Online Publishing, and after reading that, I changed my focus. The main premise (besides the software behind it) is that a community is a set of people focused on learning. So from there I learned about online community software and eventually taught myself enough to find a full time job building interesting online communties, often focused on some form of learning.

I hope to be able to learn from this course how to make better software tools for online learning by understanding how the learning half of that actually works.

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(photo by Yahoo Developer Network)

Solutiongrove has been using YUI on the front-end since it was released in 2006. I fell in love with it's sophisticated handling of browser events and how event listeners put unobtrusive in "Unobtrusive Javascript".

We have seen it evolve from a couple of core utilities to a library with complex controls and widgets.

Just a few days ago the YUI team released a developer preview of YUI 3, the next generation YUI library (YNG, YUI Next Generation). 

I haven't had a chance to try it yet out but I'm pretty sure I will soon.

While I haven't had a chance to examine the code , I have had the opportunity to read up on the documentation and join the YUI 3 Yahoo Group.

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