Contact: Brian Collins, (517) 337-1048; or Victor Inzunza, (517) 355-1826

10/7/2004

EAST LANSING, Mich. – The Cognitive Flexibility Lab at Michigan State University has launched a unique Web site that contains more than 160 presidential campaign advertisements from the earliest years of television in 1952 to the current race between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry.

The goal of the Web site is to provide K-12 students and those interested in political campaigns with an opportunity to learn how the television medium has been used in presidential politics and the nature of presidential leadership attributes and persuasive techniques.

“We think that the site can help change the way people think about campaign ads,” said Brian Collins, who is the site's project director and who is a doctoral student in the Learning, Technology and Culture program. “This is an online learning environment that supports flexibly adaptive thinking, the learning of difficult material, and open-mindedness, which are the learning attributes that a complex world requires.”
 
The site is known as EASE History, or Experience Acceleration Support Environment for History.

Collins and a team from the Cognitive Flexibility Lab, which is based in the College of Education, have gotten permission from the presidents, presidential candidates, and presidential libraries to place the advertisements on the site.

Aparna Ramchandran, the multimedia developer of EASE History, said the site has been designed with learners in mind.

By clicking on the View interface, for example, a user can see one campaign ad. The Compare interface, however, enables visitors to place two videos side by side. And the Weave interface makes it possible to work with four campaign ads at a time, which increases the number of possible connections that can be noticed within a campaign or over the years.

The ads are searchable by year, by candidate, by winner or loser, and even by whether the spot was positive or negative. The site includes a number of famous campaign ads. Under George H.W. Bush, for example, is the “Revolving Door” ad from 1988 that featured Willie Horton; the Lyndon Johnson interface includes the famous “Daisy” spot that his campaign used only once in 1964.

In addition, the site includes a learning guide for educators and students, as well as historical clips, candidate profiles, election results and analyses of the ads.

EASE History can be viewed at www.easehistory.org. The site requires Flash 7, which is downloadable for free, and a high-speed connection.