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Faculty at a Tribal College in Arizona developed a project to collect oral histories and build a library of recordings of Native American languages that are dis- appearing. Students from the linguistics and history departments participating in the project interviewed members of dozens of Indian Nations across the United States and Canada and made digital recordings of those conversations. Traditional long-distance phone service was relatively expensive, and cell phone cover- age for many Native American reservations is spotty. Nearly all of the reservations included in the project had at least one satellite Internet connection, however, and the organizers of the project decided to use Skype
to conduct the interviews. With Skype, the students were able to have phone conversations over the Internet with members of the various tribes profiled in the project, and all of this communica- tion was free. The students connected a computer to the room speakers in a lecture hall, and all 20 students could listen during each interview. Some of the people they spoke with had video cameras as well, and those interviews were held as video sessions, adding another layer to the communication between the students and the people being interviewed. Because the signals were coming over the Web as data streams, it was fairly trivial to intercept those streams and simultaneously create digital recordings of the interviews. 7 things you should know about Skype

These recordings were used to compile the oral histories for the different Indian Nations and were edited into podcasts that the students posted on the college’s Web site. Meanwhile, the linguistics students created a large library of record- ings of the many languages they encountered. These materials went into a database that is available to students at other Tribal Colleges, where they are a valuable element in the teaching and study of languages that, in many cases, are only spoken by a few hundred peoplein the world [Download] Source: Educause.edu