Nearly 200 citizens in the Ida-Viru district of Estonia will start taking free Estonian language courses. This past week, those who have citizenship in a third country, as well as those who have an 'indefinite' citizenship, were offered interviews for the courses. Interviews will be held in Harju District as well. According to Tiit Ruisu from OU Koolituse Korralduskeskus, head of the project in Ida-Viru, the people will be given lessons by 15 teachers from the various language schools. Ruisu added that the first level of studies is expected to last for a total of 100 hours - 80 hours of classwork, 20 hours of independent work.
Estonia's President Toomas Hendrik Ilves greeted the participants of the International Digital Broadcasting Conference on Aug. 27, and expressed in his welcoming speech that instead of competing with each other, different media channels are now thinking more and more about fusion and convergence into a developing and uniform media space. The president encouraged both the developers and customers to think of ways to make the dizzying development of technologies work beneficially for all people, to do this by creating an information society that works for everyone. Approximately 250 leaders from the broadcasting industry, everyone from the Baltic states, to Scandinavia, Russia, Ukraine, France, the UK, the U.S. and more gathered in Tallinn's TV Tower Conference Center for the event, to discuss media consumption habits, the rapid development of digital television, and how to bridge the digital gap between urban and rural areas.
