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mmr07: teckensprak - a tool for teaching sign language

mmr07: Teckensprak
Originally uploaded by robinhamman.

Gunilla Wagstrom, the "world's first deaf tv producer", and Ingeborg Swartlingare from Swedish Educational Broadcasting are giving a presentation about a project called teckensprakswebben.

They've created a website that helps people to learn Swedish sign language more easily. Navigation is done by clicking on themed station names along a flash based subway map. So, for example, sport or kultur.

Once within the themed area, there are around twenty words, each signed by one of forty-five notable person such as well known television presenters, the wife of the Prime Minister, and others. The video can also be sent to mobile phones.

The idea behind the project came from who Ingeborg who, at the beginning of the presentation, told us that she met a deaf man several years ago and wanted to get to know him but didn't know how to ask him to go to the theatre (which is signed in Sweden) or for other activities. She thought that if there were short videos available online it would be easier to learn specific signs.

I think the idea of arranging language around themes, and mapping those themes to a subway map, could be useful for spoken language instruction as well - but Gunilla sees her own future, one in which everyone can sign, which has the advantage of ensuring even the busiest public places remain quiet, people can chat as much as they like during films and performances, and even scuba divers can communicate.

mmr07: blogging, not email - a quote well spotted

Linkitä, linkitä, linkitä!
Originally uploaded by tuija.

Tuija grabbed this shot of Richard Fair (right) and myself on stage at the European Broadcasting Union, waiting to give our presentation earlier.

While looking at her blog, which is mostly in Finnish to largely unintelligible to myself, I spotted a quote that really resonates with what Richard and I said during our presentation - that we don't necessarily want people to send us emails, we simply want to know where people put their stuff so we can link to the best stuff. Here's the quote Tuija blogged:

"[E]-mail just doesn't work as well as it used to. Between spam and the general increase in traffic, everybody's inboxes are overflowing these days. The last thing many people want is yet another round of incoming messages. At the same time, blogs are taking over the Web" [originally on Washington Post]

PS. Hilary is doing a much better job with the live blogging than I am at the moment. I seem to have peaked around lunchtime...

mmr07: session on user produced content

mmr07: Thomas Weibel from Swiss Radio DRS2
Originally uploaded by robinhamman.

We're sitting on the stage, so it's a bit difficult to properly blog the presentations and - obviously - impossible to blog our own presentation.


Hilary Perkins managed to blog Tuija Aalto's interesting presentation and ours too.

That's her twittering and blogging in the far right, behind Guillaume du Gardier who has found a good use for his macbook's iSight camera.

mmr07: swiss unsigned bands site mx3

mx3 was set up by five Swiss public service radio stations. It allows unsigned bands in Switzerland to post their content online. In the first few days following the launch in September over 1000 bands signed up and started uploading content - which is ALOT of music for Switzerland. They're up to (28/03/07) 4700 bands and 12,500 songs.

They put their success down to three things:

good design - fast page loads and ease of use for bands; allows bands to link to online shops where they sell their music

"surf with music" - makes it easy for people to "surf music" by browsing, with powerful search and categorisation features, share with friends, etc

radios - bands know they can get their content on air (5 different stations) by uploading to the site

Samuel Vuillermoz and Dominik Born, who are giving the presentation on behalf of two of the 5 radio stations involved in the project, say that based on the number of bands uploading to their service, if it were rolled out across all of the EU it would have something like 250,000 bands contributing.

Why not just use myspace? They wanted to create something that was based in Switzerland for Swiss bands and audiences.

Interestingly, there is no Digital Rights Management and they're streaming 128k mp3.

PS. Looks like Hilary, who gave the earlier BBC in Second Life presentation, is blogging it. I found her on Twitter too.

what's the point of tagging it with mmr07?

Just had a chat with Guillaume during the coffee break and we decided to start spreading the word that people should tag with mmr07. We convinced Michael Mullane that this was a good idea and he made an announcement that was met primarily with dropping jaws ("errrr.... what?!") rather than enthusiastic understanding. It's funny how those of us who do this stuff often forget that, well, we're not normal internet users.

So what's a tag? A tag is a short description of content, usually a single word, that makes it easier for audiences to navigate their way to your content.

Tagging with mmr07 makes it possible to find photos taken by conference participants and uploaded to flickr, videos on youtube, blog posts and del.icio.us links.

Without tags, we're all sitting here on our own listening to presentations and not particularly interacting with each other. With tags we suddenly have connections, conversations, feedback. So tag it with mmr07 and let's start talking.

mmr 2007 @ european broadcasting union

Here's a video of Guillaume's (who is moblogging) presentation (well done tuija!):

Hillary Perkins (tuija has video) is giving the first of several BBC presentations of the conference. Radio One rented an island on Second Life. She says the point was to reach out to the audiences in Second Life who might not have even heard of Radio1 before. They didn't advertise or promote the fact that they were holding part of a music festival in Second Life since it wasn't about driving audiences there, it was about bringing audiences from second life to Radio1's brand.

They gave away 12,000 virtual radio1 radio's and had 6000 avatars visit the festival during the weekend. One guy made a t-shirt and gave it away to others for free.

Not everyone, of course, is happy about the growing corporate presence in second life and similar online environments but Hilary is enthusiastic as she shows avatars dancing on the BBC stage.

"It's a community. Whatever you do in that space has to be with their agreement - the community is very sensitive to what you put there.... Don't forget moderation issues. It's a creative and fun environment, so work with it. YOu can't go in and lock down your branding... give them your streams, let them put them in other places... Expect them to tak and remix your brand... If you try to stop it there will be a backlash against you..."

"Technical issues... each Island can actually only handle about 6000 visitors... you can open up your feed but not track it... you don't need to get permission from Linden Labs, it's open... they put a lot of effort into it but for the return in number of audience members, it maybe wouldn't make sense to do again, but from a PR standpoint it was great....It's a great place to try things out...."

Michael Mullane from the EBU is giving a presentation on the "shape of things to come". It's a live version of an insightful post he made a few days ago here. The presentation is gone in a flash - do check out the post, which I bookmarked the other day.

I like the idea of putting presentations online before giving them - the one Richard Fair and I are giving later today is available although it's a whopping 4 mb powerpoint with loads of annoying animations. There's also some audio in that folder that we didn't manage to embed.