The LanguageBox is a place where students and teachers of languages can publish and share their learning materials, resources and links on the web. You can use the resources directly, or create new activities to put your own twist on things. The LanguageBox was initially funded by JISC and designed, built and run by the Faroes project team at the University of Southampton and the University of Portsmouth. It is currently managed by the LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, at the University of Southampton.

This public website is for anyone who teaches languages and who wants somewhere to host and manage their materials, it's also for language students that want to record and share good stuff that they've found. It is free for everybody to use. Please create an account for yourself and try it out - we hope you will be pleased by how easily you can make your teaching materials available online.

The Software

The LanguageBox is an installation of EdShare, an attempt to reinvent learning object repositories for the Web 2.0 world. Our philosophy is to make software that is useful to users, simple to use, and which helps to build a community of teachers and learners. The LanguageBox differs from more traditional repositories in that it is a living space rather than a dusty archive!

The Faroes project developed the LanguageBox as part of the EdShare initiative. EdShare tools are based on e-prints, a tried and trusted repository infrastructure developed at the University of Southampton. E- prints is installed at over 250 institutions worldwide for managing research materials, and EdShare is extending this scope into learning and teaching.

Through the LanguageBox we have re-examined old assumptions about learning objects and learning metadata, and the LanguageBox is the first of what we hope will be many community repositories built on this software and focused on different topics.

The Faroes Team were:

• David Millard, Learning Societies Lab, The University of Southampton
• Yvonne Howard, Learning Societies Lab, The University of Southampton
• Miguel Arrebola-Sanchez, School of Languages and Area Studies, The University of Portsmouth
• Kate Borthwick, Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, The University of Southampton
• Julie Watson, Moden Languages School of Humanities, The University of Southampton
• Stavroula Varella, School of Languages and Area Studies, The University of Portsmouth
• Patrick McSweeny, Learning Societies Lab, The University of Southampton
• Adam Field, e-prints Services, The University of Southampton
• Seb Skuse, Learning Societies Lab, The University of Southampton

This site is powered by EPrints 3, free software developed by the University of Southampton.