ED MEDIA 2003 (conference)

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine]

Hey Phil,

Comments in-line.

> The Internet's effects on linguistic diversity

This is where I've been. Email and usenet used to be 7-bit, aka ASCII, then
8-bit in places, with the iso2022 and 8859-* sets of character standards,
and now domain names, hence email addresses, urls, newsgroup names, etc.,
remain stuck in ASCII (English or pseudo-English). Some things move forward,
some get stuck in the Unicode trap, and some remain 7-bit ASCII fossils.

> Promoting indigenous language development via discussion & chat

If memory serves, Micheal Wilson ran a political campaign in his tribe using
email and the web to develop a voter block. There are Cree lists, the Abenaki
list, and others too. There _used_ to be a natlang list, but the non-native
list owner shut down the list and kept the membership priavte, sigh.

> Multimedia support of language & culture

Ed Bassett did his AA at Southern Maine Tech doing a MM CD for Passamaquoddy,
he got his 2nd CD out about 2 years ago. Windows specific, but nice.

> Exploring language with digital resources
        ?
> Cultural attitudes and technology acceptance
        ?

> Modifying computers to meet minority language requirements

See above. You can play with pictures, a la HP's largess to an Inuktitut
school, or use ASCII, or use something ideosyncratic, a la SIL's BJECree
(which I think is a reasonable choice), or attempt to use Unicode.

> Oral tradition meets voice dictation

I've been meaning to get to this, I've got 50 CDs of oral material (Abenaki)
that I should get into better format(s). I'll take suggestions from anyone.

> Voice over IP, net meetings and collaborative thinking

If UofA wants to pick up the phone charges, I'll be happy to walk everyone
through setting up a VoIP testbed. The last one I set up was between Maine,
Chicago, and Beijing (PRC).

> Asynchronous, reflective discourse

I've no idea what this means. I'll wait. Maybe it will come to me.

> On-line dictionaries and language development
        ?

If anyone wants pointers to the work I know something about, drop me a line.

Kitakitamatsinopowaw,
Eric