The 8th OpenACS and .LRN Conference will take place in Cartago city, Costa Rica hosted by organized by the Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica from November 3rd to 6th 2009. The call for papers is now open.

Here are the important dates:

• Submission of Abstracts proposals for Presentations and Posters (max 150 words) - September 15th
• Notification of accepted abstracts - September 30th
• Versions of papers (6 pages Springer style) - October 5th
• OpenACS /.LRN Conference - November 3rd - 6th
• Elearning and Open Source day Conference (registration is necessary) - November 3rd

For more information visit: http://www.tec-digital.itcr.ac.cr/conferencia-dotlrn-2009/
Check out the conference poster: Spanish

.LRN is based on OpenACS and there is a new tutorial for OpenACS, this is a great way of knowing the base software of .LRN to start developing on this framework, it is aimed at absolute beginners, it covers some simple installation process, the creation of an application and some introduction to the use of ACS Objects, this tutorial is aimed to be covered in 4 days to get the basic programming skills and useful tips in this framework, going step by step for a new adopter. The tutorial goes from the "hello world" in OpenACS to advanced stuff such as creating a new package, using web forms, acs_objects and building reports.

This tutorial has a lot of work that has been going on for a while and here is the first version ready for public viewing.

OpenACS Tutorial

For more information check out: the announcement in the forums.

As a work for the .LRN Consortium we have prepared a newsletter about what happened in the community during March - June '09.

Enjoy it!

English - Spanish

A new version of .LRN is available for download.

New features

• HTML 4.01 Strict
• WAI-AA compliant
• file-storage: categorization
• views: oracle support

The Tcl/Tk application was accepted to Google Summer of Code 2008. If you have any .LRN/OpenACS projects that you think would work well as part of GSoC, please post them to the wiki

See forum post for more info

dotLRN has been translated into more language: greek!

 This language will be available in the next release of dotLRN (2.4) scheduled by early 2008.

The information about memberships, benefits, consortium duties funded by membership, and specific contributions to the consortium is now available at the .LRN Consortium Membership page.

There are different levels of membership depending the organization type, use of .LRN and resources it has. The membership helps to support .LRN growth, many new features are coming and the consortium is leading the innovation.

.LRN is Open Source and free to use, members of the .LRN Consortium have found the Consortium an excellent place to invest in the improvements for the platform. The .LRN Leadership Group and the .LRN Board of Directors serve as committed volunteers without economic retribution from the .LRN Consortium.