The MELT project has been specifically designed to address this issue and help educational content providers meet the growing challenge of volume metadata creation.
The MELT Approach
MELT is a Content Enrichment project supported by the European Commission’s eContentplus Programme that brings together 17 public and private sector content partners. Using an existing technical architecture or ‘brokerage system’, developed in the earlier CELEBRATE project, a network of content repositories will be established so that teachers and learners can easily carry out ‘federated searches’ of the MELT content.
MELT will include three different approaches to creating new and better metadata:
- Some MELT content will be enriched with metadata by expert or trained indexers
- Teachers will be provided with ‘folksonomy’ and ‘social tagging’ tools so that they can add their own metadata to MELT content they have used ‘
- New frameworks for automatic metadata generation will be used to enrich MELT content
Why folksonomies and social tagging?
In the CELEBRATE project evaluators found that metadata created by an indexer related to the learning resource type may not always reflect how a resource will really be used in classrooms by experienced teachers. For example, an indexer might decide to add metadata which indicates that something is essentially a “drill and practice” type of resource whereas, in practice, teachers might actually be able to use that resource in many different pedagogical contexts – even for collaborative learning!
MELT, therefore, begins with the assumption that we also need metadata that more accurately reflects how learning resources are actually used in different learning contexts. And that teachers themselves should be given an opportunity and tools so that they can add their own metadata to resources they have used.
Using folksonomies, or enabling teachers who have used a resource to create their own ‘tags’, is one way that MELT will help capture this information. Social tagging approaches, where metadata is open and shared with others, will also be explored. Folksonomies are seen as a means to augment the work of experienced indexers and other new approaches that include automatic metadata generation. The key goal in the project is to create a new metadata ecology involving all three elements.
Expected results:
MELT intends to provide a scalable and cost-effective solution for European content providers faced with the challenge of volume metadata creation In particular, the project will enrich over 37,000 learning resources and 97,000 learning assets with a large quantity of new metadata that will:
- Facilitate greater cross-curricular use of the content within countries.
- Extend the use of the content to different regions within the same country
- Provide new opportunities for teachers across Europe to use learning resources and learning assets from other countries.
- Play an important role in helping European Schoolnet to launch a pan-European Learning Resource Exchange for schools.
MELT Partners:
Along with EUN, MELT has 18 partners from 13 countries (Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Hungary, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, UK) including 12 Ministries of Education or educational agencies identified by these partners to act on their behalf in the project.
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven/ ARIADNE Foundation (BE)
Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur (AT)
Cambridge-Hitachi (UK)
Danube University Krems (AT)
FWU (DE)
INDIRE (IT)
Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (ES)
Ministry of Education, Science and Culture Iceland (IS)
University of Ljubljana (SI)
National Board of Education Finland (FI)
National Centre for Technology in Education (IE)
Europese Hogeschool Brussel (BE)
EDUCATIO/Ministry of Education (HU)
Swedish Agency for Flexible Learning (CSE)
Myndigheten för skolutveckling (SE)
Tiger Leap Foundation (EE)
XTEC Xarxa Telematica Educativa de Catalunya (ES)
Skolavefurinn (IS)
Timescale
October 2006 – December 2008
More Information:
http://melt-project.eun.org
