LAMS and DESILA

Today my colleague Nigel Ford and I had a meeting with Sabine Little and Ola Aiyegbayo about the DeSILA (Designing and Sharing Inquiry-based Learning Activities) project which is evaluating use of LAMS. LAMS enables you to create online sequences of activities for students. So, for example, I have been able to create an online activity where students view a short online article, then make comments about 2 different abstracts of the article, and finally vote on which abstract is best (this follows up a face-to-face session on abstracting, unsurprisingly).

We're intending to use this as a sort of introduction to using LAMS sequences in a larger, new, task which Nigel and I have been planning out for students on our postgraduate Information Resources and Information Literacy module. This larger task spreads over several weeks and involves groups of students producing short guides to key databases and then evaluating each other's guides. This aims to develop skills in the databases concerned, plus develop some skills and knowledge to do with learning and teaching.

Before I knew more about LAMS I envisaged the students being guided through one big sequence, but it is now evident that that isn't really a good idea, so we are developing a number of different sequences aiming at different parts of the task . This (hopefully!!) will help develop students' skills and knowledge and make the whole thing more interesting. As it part of DeSILA the good thing is that we will get an evaluation of LAMS use "built in", so to speak. Anyway, I shall probably report on this further. We might be sharing the LAMS sequences with the LAMS community at the end. I notice that the LAMS page linked to above says that "LAMS is a revolutionary new tool for designing, managing and delivering online collaborative learning activities" which I think is overstating the case more than somewhat, but it will be interesting to see what it can do and not do.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Sept 2006.