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home > Media services > News > European Learning Resource Exchange seminar in Brussels European Learning Resource Exchange seminar in Brussels A European Learning Resource Exchange (LRE) seminar took place in Brussels on 23 March 2006. The event brought together close to 100 organisations with an interest in digital educational content. LRE will build on EUN’s work in projects such as CELEBRATE, eCOLOURS, LIFE, FIRE, CALIBRATE and the new MELT project have all been consciously designed as part of a strategic vision for a new Learning Resource Exchange. Organisations represented at the event included Ministries of Education, regional educational authorities, commercial publishers, broadcasters, cultural institutions and other non-profit organisations who are offering extensive but heterogeneous catalogues and repositories of online content to schools. The LRE aims to bridge all these actors’ experiences and endeavours and build a common European platform for the exchange of digital resources that have been developed for schools. The EUN executive director, Ulf Lundin also explained how the LRE represents the framework within which European Schoolnet will accommodate all of its work related to sharing and using digital learning resources. At the European level, Maruja Gutiérrez Díaz, European Commission, DG Education and Culture, Head of Unit Multimedia, shared her enthusiasm for education and libraries, stating that, she is currently pleased to see more and more teachers that are sharing educational content in their everyday practices. The presentations at the workshop featured the CELEBRATE and CALIBRATE projects. Jim Ayre, who helps develop and co-ordinate EUN projects dealing with digital resources, gave an overview of the projects and how they can be of benefit to the LRE. Jim Ayre also presented MELT, a newly approved eContentplus project, which is likely to start in September 2006. A key goal in this new project is to see how metadata can be created cost-effectively using new approaches to ‘social tagging’ and automatic metadata generation and to enrich content with metadata that accurately reflects how learning resources have actually been used by teachers and learners. Frans Van Assche, Senior Manager Interoperability at the EUN Office presented LIFE, the Learning Interoperability Framework for Europe while David Massart from the EUN Office presented the LRE technical architecture and explained some of the services. Essentially, the LRE is seen as a federation of public and private sector content repositories (including those hosted by learning platforms vendors), based on a ‘brokerage system’ architecture called LIMBS. For those seeking to know more about connecting to the LRE, it was announced that a 2-day developer workshop is being planned in Ljubljana in June and that the EUN can provide other forms of support to repositories that wish to join the LRE federation. Sylvia Hartinger, also from EUN showed an early version of the CALIBRATE portal for up to 100 schools that are participating in this project. This will serve as the model for a LRE portal that will be become freely available to all teachers and pupils at the end of 2006. For a full list of presentations given at the meeting, see the article on Insight in the Monthly Insight to interoperability section:
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