The re-election of Frans Van Assche shows that the work that European Schoolnet has been carrying out in the field of learning technologies is well received and recognised. This also enhances the credibility of ongoing work to support interoperability and open standards in educational settings in the whole of Europe. The use of open standards enhances usability, accessibility, efficiency, and eventually helps to reduce costs.

European Schoolnet's Efforts in the Field
European Schoolnet has been working on interoperability and specifications to facilitate the implementation of learning technologies in schools across Europe since its beginning in 1996. There have been various European Commission funded projects to support this work.

The first project was MM1010 which established a European school information network, i.e. European Schoolnet itself. The project also created the first European Schoolnet metadata model (EUNMES) and an educational Thesaurus.

A follow-up project, part of the fifth Framework Program was called European Treasury Browser (ETB) which aims to create an infrastructure for the exchange of European learning resources. A multilingual thesaurus of 11 language versions was created within the project.

Furthermore, CELEBRATE, that has recently ended, built upon the interoperability of Learning Objects (LO) and different Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS) so that the one is not dependent on the other.
The CELEBRATE website with project reviews and results is online at http://celebrate.eun.org.

Other work on interoperability issues is carried out in projects like OASIS, that focuses on improving schools' interoperability enabling different applications to share data between systems and services from different platforms.

Currently, eColors-project continues the work on cross-boarder creation of learning resources, whereas EUN members are actively seeking efficient ways to agree upon the exchange on learning resources in the European level.

About the Workshop on Learning Technologies
The CEN/ISSS Workshop on Learning Technologies (WSLT) is open for everybody to join. It is relevant for parties like education and training authorities (national as well as regional), universities, providers of professional training, software producers, telecom and Internet service providers, educational publishers and broadcasters, and more.

Further information is available:
Insight - Interoperability
http://insight.eun.org

CEN/ISSS LTWS:
http://www.cenorm.be/isss/Workshop/lt/

Repository of Taxonomies and Vocabularies for a European Learning
Society: http://www.cenorm.be/isss/LT-vocabulary/vocrep.html