Ongoing Activities
- 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. Tele-
and Web-conferencing have been used from the initial stages through current times to develop planning and implementation of VCLA principles, methods and goals. - Members have constructed a Virtual Linguistics Lab (VLL), which provides 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. - Members of the VCLA use web-conferenciang to conduct a multi-site distributed course wherein materials of the Virtual Linguistics Lab are taught to a number of distributed collaborating university sites. NSF has provided initial support for this multi-site course and the cyberinfrastructure-based materials and methods it uses through its NSF CITEAM program. The Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) of this course provides advanced methodological foundations for the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) which the VCLA is pursuing. Cornell, University of Texas/El Paso, Rutgers and MIT have participated in first application of this new multisite course structure.
- 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 previous director of Albert R. Mann Library, Janet McCue, her staff, 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.)