Tomorrow (28th November at 11:30am GMT) I will give a talk in Milton Keynes where I’m currently working as a “visiting researcher” at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University UK. The talk is titled “ALOE - an Open and Social Resource and Metadata Hub.” And here’s the abstract:

In this presentation the requirements of a framework for sharing digital resources and metadata to meet the needs of open, flexible e-learning solutions will be discussed.
The changing nature of the Web and its users as observed in recent years clearly establishes the need for new approaches and technologies to fully exploit the potential for working with existing digital resources.
Formal metadata about the resources can be combined with information created in lightweight and user-centric approaches in order to significantly enhance resource descriptions and enable more efficient access to existing knowledge. The ALOE system, currently in development at DFKI, is one such solution and will be presented as a realization of an appropriate framework.

It seems that there won’t be any recording or webcasting, but check out this link, just in any case.

The last two weeks we spent adding (smaller) functionalities to the system and fixing some bugs that were reported by our beta testers. We also changed the encoding in our database which caused us so much trouble in the last weeks. Thanks a lot to David Haase who spent a great amount of effort and care to fix our database problem and save our data. We also integrated the new Ajax functionalities which were implemented by our intern Martin Uhlir.

The new Ajax functionalities are:

• Automatically refreshing number of unread messages on the welcome page.
• Sand glasses on the contribute pages which appear after the contribute button has been clicked.
• Check nickname availability on the registration page.

Furthermore, the following functionalities have been added:

• Stay logged in via cookie.
• Resources can now also be inserted into sets in the contribute step.
• In the lists “Highest Rated” and “Most Viewed” the according values (average rating value and number of views) are displayed.
• Different ranking options for “My resources” and “My favorites”.
• User-definded metadata sets may be deleted by their contributors.
• Users can choose among three different privacy levels for profile details (public, contacts, private).
• New display of member lists.

Wow, a small step for mankind, but a huge step for ALOE! Will this be our international breakthrough?

Ok, to be honest: It was maybe only seen by my dear colleague Stephan and me in the impressive Apple Flagship Store…but it looks great, even on an iPod touch, doesn’t it?