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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...

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.