The Spoken Word Project proposes to transform undergraduate learning and
teaching through integrating the rich media resources of digital audio
repositories into undergraduate courses in history, political science
and cognate disciplines in the U.S. and Britain. The project will take
full advantage of the flexibility inherent in digital repositories and
build processes for learning that will fundamentally expand the way students
and teachers understand knowledge, knowledge resources, and their own
complementary roles in higher education. Michigan State University, in
collaboration with Northwestern University and the National Archives
and Records Administration (NARA), and Glasgow Caledonian University,
in collaboration with the BBC - Information & Archives, will develop
and implement this vision. These partners bring to this project an outstanding
combination of institutional leadership, commitment to innovative and
effective teaching, strong experience developing state-of-the-art digital
repositories and educational technology, as well as a proven history
of effective professional collaboration.
Starting with a rich collection of digitized audio resources, associated
texts and images, and a set of integrated online annotation tools, this
work will promote the usability and integration of digital spoken word
repositories to improve undergraduate teaching. The project will test
whether and with what effect the integration of digital audio resources
into university courses achieves four major project outcomes: (1) improving
student learning and retention, (2) developing aural literacy in our
students, (3) augmenting student competence to write on --and for --
the Internet, and, (4) enhancing digital libraries through a focus on
learning.
The intellectual merit of The Spoken Word Project lies in its advancement of both teaching and learning with digital repository sources and on its innovation for advancing the utility and value of digital libraries. Project activities will greatly enhance digital libraries by redirecting the challenges of research toward higher-level analysis and data sifting and away from lengthy search-and-browse routines that vast and growing data libraries can require.
The project will achieve this by reducing the search for relevance, expanding
the metadata with user-specific annotation, and tying the libraries'
content directly to course materials. The project will re-purpose existing
educational technology into a suite of easy-to-use online annotation
tools that will be deployed in online learning environments in order
to access digital library resources. The tools will enable users to identify
and save start- and stop-points in a streamed media file and to add commentary
and descriptive data for their own use or to be shared with others. As
students and teachers use the archive, the resulting media selections
and annotations will be stored in a repository for subsequent use and
shared among user communities.
The
broader impacts of The Spoken Word
project includes the advancement of teaching
and learning in areas of enduring concern
across the humanities and social sciences.
Digital Library collections will be correlated
directly to mainstream course materials in
history, politics and cognate disciplines
in the US and Britain. Collections of special
interest include: World War Two and Its Aftermath,
Public Debates in the History of Twentieth
Century Science, Oral Advocacy
in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Studs Terkel
Collection, and The White House Tapes of Lyndon
B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. Working together,
the partners in this 
collaboration shall bring thousands of hours of authoritative
spoken-word materials into classrooms and virtual learning environments
in the United States and United Kingdom. The resulting evidence, obtained
from large sample fully crossed experimental design, will
determine whether or not project outcomes have been achieved.
