The first MELT focus group meeting took place in Brussels on 29-30 January. 15 participants, both focus group coordinators and participating teachers from eight different MELT countries followed a two-day workshop on social bookmarking and tagging.

MELT aims at creating better access to open learning resources across Europe. Since Sept 2006 project partners work on different ways to enrich learning resources with metadata in order to enhance their discovery and reuse on the European level.

The task of the focus group teachers is to tell the project developers about the needs and requirements that teachers have when accessing learning resources and what kind of tools should be useful. The focus group teachers will, throughout the project, be the testers' group interacting closely with the developers to create an easy and intuitive way for teachers to share and access learning resources.

The new idea that will be implemented in the MELT project is called social bookmarking. When a teacher finds an interesting learning resource, she can make a bookmark on it and add her own keywords to find it easily back later. These favourite bookmarks are saved on the portal, so that next time when the teacher logs-on to the learning resources portal, all the favourites are readily available. Teachers will also be able to share their favourite learning resources with others and other teachers can browse bookmarks from like-minded teachers. This way of accessing learning resources is totally new in the field of education, and MELT will assess how teachers like it.

Some popular social bookmarking sites for Website are del.icio.us and Furl, to mention but a few, whereas collaborative tagging is popular on the services like Flickr (pictures) and lastFM (music). MELT aims at implementing similar popular services for teachers across Europe.