Ongoing Activities
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The VCLA has created an international community of scholars committed to interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic collaborative research and teaching in the area of language acquisition. Teleconferencing has been used in these initial stages to initiate and develop planning of VCLA principles, methods and goals.
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Members are now constructing a Virtual Linguistics Lab (VLL), which can provide the materials necessary for collaborative research and teaching in a cyberinfrastructure (CI) dimension. This VLL includes manuals of best practices for collection, transcription and analyses of language data, teaching modules involving web based interactive interfaces which guide the learning of various methodologies in the area, audio-visual demonstration packets and shared databases of language data.
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Members of the VCLA now are creating a new infrastructure which links research labs to University Libraries and links University Libraries to each other, in order to provide for calibrated storage, dissemination and access of shared digital materials and data.
A Small Grant for Exploratory Research has been awarded by NSF's Science and Engineering Information Integration and Informatics Program allowing the director of Albert R. Mann Library, Janet McCue, and professor Barbara Lust to begin to explore this infrastructure. MIT researcher Suzanne Flynn and MIT University Librarian Theresa Tobin are exploring the cross-university link.)
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Members of the VCLA are planning to move beyond the teleconferencing format to a web-based format to introduce a multi-site distributed course wherein materials of the Virtual Linguistics Lab will be taught to eight distributed university sites. Application has now been made to NSF for support of this course, and the cyberinfrastructure-based materials and methods it will use.
The Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) this course will teach will provide advanced methodological foundations for the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) which the VCLA is pursuing.
