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How MELT took the fast lane to China
Author: Chris Jenkins

MELTSkólavefurinn, our Icelandic partners in the MELT project, have published the project brochure in Chinese. This development, which might at first appear surprising, springs from a project undertaken by Dr. Geir Sigurðsson, Phd. in Chinese Philosophy (current Director of Icelandic Center for Asian Studies of the University of Iceland and Director of Northern Light Confucius Institute of Iceland). Dr. Sigurðsson has been creating teaching materials for Icelanders learning Chinese and introducing China to Icelanders.

His work over the last two years has included close collaboration with Skólavefurinn, the leading provider of online teaching materials for schools in Iceland, who are now making these materials available on their website.

As Jökull Sigurðsson, Director of Skolavefurinn puts it: “When we were translating the MELT brochure into Icelandic, we thought that the size of the project and its global aspect would be of interest to the Chinese.”  Jökull adds: “From there on we arranged for Jing Xu, Chinese Bachelor of Art in Economics and German, to translate the brochure.”

Furthermore, we learn that Dr. Sigurðsson has shown an interest in introducing the MELT project to Chinese Universities when he will be pursuing his research this summer during a visit to China.

Good luck- Fu: Good luck

 

Links:

For further information:
Maité Debry
European Schoolnet
Tel: +32 790 75 75
maite.debry@eun.org

 

About European Schoolnet:
European Schoolnet (www.europeanschoolnet.org) is a unique not-for-profit consortium of 31 ministries of education in Europe created in 1997. It provides major European education portals for teaching, learning and collaboration and leads the way in bringing about change in schooling through the use of new technology.

 

About MELT
MELT (a Metadata Ecology for Learning and Teaching) is a 27-month Content Enrichment project supported by the European Commission’s eContentplus Programme. Starting in October 2006, it brings together 17 public and private sector content partners, including 13 Ministries of Education, and is coordinated by European Schoolnet (EUN).

A key aim in MELT is particularly to enrich educational content with metadata that reflects the actual use of learning resources and assets by teachers and pupils in a variety of learning contexts.

The project is also designed to both raise the awareness of teachers across Europe on the need for accurate tagging of resources and to provide a user-friendly system that motivates teachers to quickly and easily add metadata to resources that they have both used and created. Building on MELT and work in other projects, EUN and its partners will launch a publicly available Learning Resource Exchange service for school later in 2008.