The conference was opened with a welcome
from Professor Janet Greely, Executive Dean, Faculty of Human Sciences,
Macquarie University, who acknowledged the Dharug and Guringai nations as the
traditional custodians of the land, and paid respects to their elders past and
present. It was the first time I had experienced this custom in Australia,
which seems to mark a coming of age of the nation as a whole.
Professor Greely’s recognition of LAMS as a
valued contribution to education was further endorsed by Senator Ursula
Stephens, Parliamentary Secretary for Social Inclusion and the Voluntary
Sector, who put it into the context of the government’s ambitions for
education. James Dalziel has worked hard to put LAMS on the map. For many
educators across the world, it has put Macquarie on the map. However, the focus
of this conference was not just LAMS, but Learning Design in general, as an
emerging force in learning technologies, in which LAMS plays a key role.

Participants at the LAMS conference
(© MELCOE, Macquarie University)
This was a theme I took up in the keynote,
to consider how we might conceptualise learning design as both an analytical
and a creative process. The analytical part has to support teachers in aligning
elements such as teaching methods and learning outcomes, with resources such as
teacher and learner time. The creative part has to work within these
constraints to support teachers in building on each others’ ideas, relating
learner needs to pedagogic design, exploring and sharing their discoveries -
and this is where LAMS acts as such a great experimental tool for
‘teaching-as-design’.
The second keynote, from Leanne Cameron and
Matthew Kearney, deployed the innovative approach of inviting their pre-service
teacher education students to join them to recount their own experiences of
using LAMS. The key issues to emerge were:
- the importance of colour in the
visualisation of an activity sequence - you can readily see the type of
pedagogy it represents;
- the importance of ‘preview’ which
enables the designer to run through their sequence as a learner, and quickly
see how it can be improved - it becomes a way of thinking about learning;
- the value of the tangible outcome of
each student teacher’s contribution to the LAMS community as a clearer
representation of what they had learned than an essay, and also as an item for
their CV;
- the importance of a workshop
introduction to using LAMS.
There were 24 presentations throughout the
day in parallel sessions, all available on the conference website. I could only
sample a few, and they were all impressive. Bronwen Dalziel showed how medical
teachers were using LAMS sequences, and gradually being encouraged to include
more student collaboration activities to leaven the focus on presentation of
information through the ‘Noticeboard’ activity. There was a fascinating
confirmation of Leanne’s finding of the importance of colour: when Bronwen put
up one sequence that was almost all ‘Noticeboard’ activity, a gasp went up from
the audience as they instantly recognised this as a non-interactive pedagogical
design!
One of the critical problems of learning
design as a research programme is its ontology - what are the elements and
their interrelationships that define the field? Grainne Conole offered one
route into this in the form of ‘Cloudworks’, an online community repository of
learning and teaching ideas, enabling teachers and learning designers to share,
discuss, and showcase their ideas. With folksonomy tagging for these ‘clouds’
we could see how the community might ultimately evolve its own ontological
account of the field of learning design, as an emergent phenomenon from this
kind of sharing, critiquing and negotiating.
LAMS offers a simple interface to designing
a learning activity sequence, and yet for many lecturers and teachers it still
presents a barrier as they try to understand how to use it. So the LAMS team is
developing an ‘activity planner’, which Leanne Cameron explained in her own
session. As a design wizard approach, it enables the user to choose the kind of
sequence they want - e.g. problem-based learning, role-play etc - and then
takes them through a typical sequence, to edit in their own questions,
instructions, and resources. The audience response was very positive because
the approach balances ease of use with ‘making it your own’. Each decision
point is an opportunity to link through to existing ideas or designs, or to
advice and guidance in an online repository such as Phoebe (http://phoebe-app.conted.ox.ac.uk/).
We saw several examples of other elements
of learning design, supported by the LAMS environment. Eva Dobozy showed how
the monitoring feature could be used to assess the level and quality of student
engagement with a problem - clustered into three types in her example of an
educational policy course: a simple statement, an inquiry-based argument, or
evidence-based position-taking. Adam Stechyk and Marcin Choynowski showed how
the University of Szczecin is using LAMS in an economics course to build in a
wide range of activities, including graphics, simulations, quizzes, a virtual
mentor, and multimedia. Particularly interesting was their analysis of teacher
design time needed for blended learning vs wholly e-learning sequences. This is
an important area for the learning design community to address, as it is
critical to the choice and comparison of different learning designs, and yet
remains seriously under-researched.
The day ended with James Dalziel outlining
the new features of LAMS release 2.2, followed by some good audience
participation, as he offered us some new ways of visualising learning designs -
the most popular ones were the ‘content view’, the annotation view, and a
time-based view, for both duration of activity and elapsed time on a calendar.

Screenshot of LAMS v2.2
This combination of conceptualisations of
aspects of learning design as a process, and tales from the practitioners’
experiences of using a powerful learning design tool, made a rich mix of
enormous value for all of us who attended. You can attend it too: the slides
and audio for most presentations are on the website at http://lams2008sydney.lamsfoundation.org/program.htm,
and Grainne Conole’s cloudscape of the conference is at http://cloudworks.ac.uk/node/571.
Diana Laurillard
London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education