Lightweight Repository Allows Language Teachers To Share Resources

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/21/08

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The University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is leading a project that will make it possible for language teachers to share their learning resources easily. The Language Box is a lightweight repository that acts as a host for language teachers to deposit their resources and share them with friends and colleagues in their community.

"This has never been done before in the field of languages," said Yvonne Howard, Language Box project leader at the ECS Learning Societies Lab. "It's a kind of YouTube for teachers. We were clear that we didn't want a dusty old place for information to rot or screens full of metadata. Instead we have developed a facility that really gives teachers what they need to do their job."

The initiative is part of the Faroes project, begun in 2007, to create a lightweight repository that could support the sharing of multimedia resources among language teachers and e-learning technologists. The project is expected to end in March 2009.