Holiday Surprise

A kindergarten girl with Deaf parents chose to sign the songs for them rather than using the generic hand motions with the rest of the class at her school's holiday concert. Now that's what I call inclusive communication! I bet her surprised parents were so proud. Whether you know sign language or not, this short video is guaranteed to lift your spirits this season. I could watch it over and over to see how this little girl stole the show. Enjoy and happy holidays!

Signing to My Dog

I hate to admit it but my family doesn't share my enthusiasm for ASL. They rarely use even the most basic signs with me. So naturally I turned to my best buddy, Rusty, for my signing practice. As you can imagine, he learned the signs for "food" and "outside" really fast!

Today when he lifted his paw to me, I decided to sign "Nice to meet you" back to him. To my surprise he immediately started licking my hands enthusiastically. My husband noticed and decided he wanted to try it. I showed him how to make the sign and then he called Rusty over to his side. When he signed "Nice to meet you", Rusty licked his hands too. Who would have thought it would take my dog to get my husband willing to sign?

I used to think I was a little silly to sign to my dog. But I came across this video which encourages dog owners to sign to their dogs. Unfortunately, the video isn't captioned so here's a brief summary of its dialog: The trainer begins by discussing the advantages of signing to a dog. Then she relaxes her dog by rubbing his back, when he's ready she demonstrates sit, down, up, stay, and shake paw. She rewards the dog with "good dog" and "I love you" and of course treats. The trainer concludes that dogs respond to gestures and body language more than verbal commands.



I've also come across online instructions for teaching your dog sign language commands.

To conclude this post, I'm going to leave you with the story of Sparky. This 1 year old deaf dog was trained by prison inmates to respond to sign language commands. Afterwards, the prisoners thought he should live with people who would appreciate his abilities, so he was moved to a new home at the Missouri School for the Deaf. There he has made many new friends and the students are teaching him even more signs. You can see a picture of Sparky and read the full story here.

Telling the Story of My Sign Name

I recently posted about receiving my sign name from a class of students at a deaf school in Costa Rica. At lunch that day, I was asked by Discovering Deaf Worlds to tell my story on video. I did so using as many signs as I could. By the end of this narrative, my words had run ahead of my signing ability and I had made several signing errors. But I hope you can ignore that and enjoy the story anyways. My delight in receiving a sign name shines through despite the mistakes.

Jennifer Aniston Plays Deaf in "Love Happens"

For my deaf readers, this is what he says in the clip:
"Excuse me, I'm sorry."
"Hi, uh. Do you remember me from the hallway upstairs? You dropped your pen." [She says nothing.]
"Um. Would you like to have a cup of coffee?" [She looks over his shoulder at a cardboard cutout of him.]
"Ah, right. Um. Well, we could bring him along if you want. Double your pleasure."[She signs her response.]
"I'm sorry. I..."

But what is she saying? What I'm seeing is that she's telling him it will "never work". Can you tell me more of what she's saying?

I'd also like to know what you think of the fact that Jennifer Aniston's character Eloise isn't actually deaf? I kept waiting for the movie to fill us in on how Eloise knows ASL. But that question is never answered in the film. At one point she and Aaron Eckhart's character go visit her mother and I'm thinking "Aha! Her mother must be deaf." But no, that wasn't the case. When the film has been seen in its entirety, the scene with her mother seems totally unnecessary. I left the theatre wondering if a subplot or two were left on the cutting room floor.

One review says "Learn from Jennifer Aniston a smart way to dodge Aaron Eckhart's approach through a new clip from Brandon Camp-directed romantic drama." Oh right, so young beautiful girls will now be learning sign language to discourage unwanted romantic attention. To me this whole scenario implies that there's something unattractive or off putting about being deaf.
Here's a comment from Jennifer herself on the scene. The source is an online article about an interview she did with Good Morning America on September 9th.

During one scene in the movie, Eloise pretends to be deaf to ward off the advances of Dr. Burke Ryan (Aaron Eckhart). Mathison asks Jennifer if she herself has ever pretended to be deaf to get rid of a guy and Aniston replies, "No, I have not, but I thought that was kind of clever."

What do you think?

ALA: Day Two

Yesterday I referred to the numerous acronyms that were part of my training sessions. I thought I'd serve you up a small helping of our program's acronym soup. I'll be interested to know how many (if any) of these acronyms you've ever encountered.

RDA Resource Description Access
DC Dublin Core
METS Metadata Encoding Transmission Standards
MODS Metadata Object Description Schema
DLF Digital Library Federation (has a Star Trek ring to it, doesn't it)
NSDL National Science Digital Library
MADS Metadata Authority Description Schema
VRA Visual Resources Association
FRAD Functional Requirements for Authority Data
VIAF Virtual International Authority File
SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System
ONIX Online Information Exchange

Hungry for more? How about this mouthful: OAI-PMH Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting? Generally the terms were defined once and then ever afterwards referred to by acronym. Heh, you want to fit in with the metadata crowd, don't name drop - acronym drop!

Today I had a more deaf friendly day. I had the same speakers as yesterday and today they consistently remembered to repeat participants' questions and comments. I am so impressed I am going to make a point of noting it on the evaluation form.

I had lunch with the new friend I made yesterday. We didn't discuss metadata once. Instead we swapped stories of our hearing loss experiences. We let each other know when the wait staff were hovering just behind us as neither of us could sense their presence when they were out of view. We talked about how we don't quite fit into the hearing world or the "capital D" Deaf world. We discussed ASL and we gradually began incorporating it into our conversation. It was great getting to know her better and I hope we will stay in touch after the conference ends.

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