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Development of a new digital library – leveraging virtual interactions to engage learners in reading.
ALISE 2009 Juried Paper Title – Development of a new digital library – leveraging virtual interactions to engage learners in reading.
Abstract (Limit 500 Words)
This paper describes an ongoing research project that involves creating a digital and virtual presence for Cocky’s Reading Express™ . The purpose of this research was to explore the functions that members from the educational community would desire from a virtual space. Specifically, what interactions and functions do educators, parents, school librarians and other stakeholders feel are appropriate for a virtual space dedicated to literacy and learning?
Research done by the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) has exposed a deficiency in today’s digital landscape. Other than the ICDL there are only a handful of digital libraries designed specifically for children. These libraries are the Cortsen Children’s Library at Princeton University, the Internet Archive Children’s Library , the Baldwin Library of Children’s Literature Digital Collection , the Fairrosa Cyber Library of Children’s Literature and the New York Public Library (NYPL) On-Lion for Kids Reading Room.
The primary focus on these previous digital libraries vary but generally the focus is either on the interface mechanisms for delivering digital content or increasing access to historical collections. While these are worthy goals, these projects overlook shared views and distributed learning that could potentially occur in these rich digital environments. This new project seeks to explore the feasibility of combining digital texts along with synchronous and asynchronous modes of interaction.
The work of Dillon & Gabbard (1998) should remind us that we need to be careful to separate the promise of technology from the actual results. More specifically, the work of (Chen & Chao, 2008; de Jong & Bus, 2002; Dillon & Gabbard, 1998; Woodfine, Nunes, & Wright, 2008) indicate that results are inconclusive when performing reading and learning tasks in digital environments.
Factors like information overload (Chen, 2005); interface design for children (Hutchinson, Druin, & Bederson, 2007); stakeholder attitudes of adoption and acceptance of new learning technology; and completion of tasks by groups in virtual environments (Balthazard, Potter, & Warren, 2004; Hall & Gordon, 1998; Jones & Rafaeli, 1999; Kahai, Carroll, & Jestice, 2007; Lowry, Roberts, Romano Jr, Cheney, & Hightower, 2006; Peterson, 2006; and Quentin, 2000) will all have some bearing on the proposed study.
To evaluate the feasibility of a Cocky Digital Library surveys were sent to library media specialists, educators and parents to inquire about their desire for a virtual space focused on reading. The purpose of the survey was to understand the shape and form of a virtual space that would fit into their current practices and to evaluate their current practices in relation to the findings the various fields. Participants were identified from SC email listservs and from contacts within the South Carolina Department for Public Instruction.
This work seeks to define a series of factors and functions stakeholders desire from a digital library focused on literacy and learning. Digital libraries need to increase the capabilities for interaction by exploring seamless integration virtual environments into existing collections.
Balthazard, P., Potter, R.E., & Warren, J. (2004). Expertise, extraversion and group interaction styles as performance indicators in virtual teams: how do perceptions of IT's performance get formed? ACM SIGMIS Database, 35(1).
Chen, C.-Y. (2005). Managing perceptions of information overload in computer-mediated communication, from http://hdl.handle.net/1969/1370
Chen, G.D., & Chao, P.Y. (2008). Augmenting traditional books with context-aware learning supports from online learning communities. Educational Technology & Society, 11(2), 27-40.
de Jong, M.T., & Bus, A.G. (2002). Quality of book-reading matters for emergent readers: An experiment with the same book in a regular or electronic format. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94(1), 145-155.
Dillon, A., & Gabbard, R. (1998). Hypermedia as an educational technology: A review of the quantitative research literature on learner comprehension, control, and style. Review of Educational Research, 68(3), 322-349.
Hall, L., & Gordon, A. (1998). A virtual learning environment for entity relationship modelling. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 30(1).
Hutchinson, H.B., Druin, A., & Bederson, B.B. (2007). Supporting elementary-age children's searching and browsing: Design and evaluation using the international children's digital library. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(11), 1618-1630.
Jones, Q., & Rafaeli, S. (1999). User population and user contributions to virtual publics: a systems model. GROUP '99: Proceedings of the international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work ; ACM.
Kahai, S.S., Carroll, E., & Jestice, R. (2007). Team collaboration in virtual worlds. ACM SIGMIS Database, 38(4).
Lowry, P.B., Roberts, T.L., Romano Jr, N.C., Cheney, P.D., & Hightower, R.T. (2006). The Impact of Group Size and Social Presence on Small-Group Communication. Small Group Research, 37(6), 631(631).
Peterson, M. (2006). Learner interaction management in an avatar and chat-based virtual world. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 19(1), 79(24).
Quentin, J. (2000). An empirical investigation of boundaries to virtual public discourse structure. CHI '00: CHI '00 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems ; ACM.
Woodfine, B.P., Nunes, M.B., & Wright, D.J. (2008). Text-based synchronous e-learning and dyslexia: Not necessarily the perfect match! Computers & Education, 50(3), 703-717.
Ron T. Brown, PhD, Assistant Professor
School of Library and Information Science
University of South Carolina
ronbrown@sc.edu
1501 Greene Street
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
Development of a new digital library – leveraging virtual interactions to engage learners in reading.
Abstract
This paper describes an ongoing research project that involves creating a digital and virtual presence for Cocky’s Reading Express™ . Currently digital libraries largely focus on providing content that has a historical focus or focus on delivering content through state of the art interfaces. This focus misses perhaps the most important aspect that libraries bring to their communities: a focus on teaching children to read. While libraries perform the important function of providing children with books, they also engage early readers to develop their comprehension, analytical and creative skills through the variety of programs libraries support. In other educational settings, educators engage early readers in the process of acquiring language through the use of phonemics, repetition, memorization, literacy circles and other modern state of the art literacy techniques. Library and Information Science (LIS) digital library researchers seldom, if ever, explore the deeper cognitive issues of the reading process as tied to online resources.
This research explores this question: in what ways can digital libraries engage early learners in the process of reading? With this purpose in mind, exploratory research was undertaken to understand the types of information currently used by educators to assist with the reading process. A survey was administered to reading recovery teachers, literacy coordinators, library media specialists and other educators primarily from the state of SC. The survey collected data on the positive and negative characteristics educators associated with both paper and Web resources used for reading. Additionally the survey asked participants to identify any Web based resources they use.
Of the resources mentioned only one resource the International Children’s Digital Library originates from a partnership with LIS researchers. Web resources have many positive aspects to them including how these resources engage early readers, how easy they are to use and their accuracy. However, they also have negative characteristics such as subscription prices, reinforcement of negative learning stereotypes and technical issues which can prevent their successful application.
This study highlights the need for Library and Information Science researchers to embark upon new digital library projects. More specifically projects are needed that will focus on understanding the process of reading from our unique interdisciplinary perspective. The next steps of this research are to analyze the Web based resources from this study to identify the functions these Web sites allow users to perform with respect to reading. Future research will involve collecting data which will help us to understand the process of reading from both early readers’ and educators’ perspectives. The purpose these steps are to aid in the creation of a prototype digital library that educators can use to assist them with the reading process.
Research done by the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) has exposed a deficiency in today’s digital landscape. Other than the ICDL there are only a handful of digital libraries designed specifically for children. These libraries are the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University, the Internet Archive Children’s Library , the Baldwin Library of Children’s Literature Digital Collection , the Fairrosa Cyber Library of Children’s Literature and Tumblebooks .
The primary focus on these previous digital libraries vary but generally the focus is either on the interface mechanisms for delivering digital content or increasing access to historical collections. While these are worthy goals, these projects overlook another deficiency that needs to be addressed: the reading and achievement gap. Digital libraries create the opportunity for creating shared views, enabling distributed learning, and repackaging educational resources for consolidation and redistribution. To varying degrees these problems are being explored by sites like, The Gateway to Educational Materials , the National Science Digital Library , and MathForum , to name a few. These endeavors are important but again they point to a gap in the landscape of digital libraries. A new type of digital library can fill this gap. These digital libraries will pool early literacy resources, provide educators with access to reading and professional development and allow children to read digital books. Before these tools can be developed basic information needs must be collected from a variety of populations. This current research is one step towards understanding the current interactions educators and early readers have with online material. By understanding the benefits and challenges of working with online resources focused on reading, new digital library resources can be built that are more specific to the process of reading.
The proposed project is in conjunction with the efforts of the South Carolina Center for Children’s Book and Literacy (SCCCBL) Cocky’s Reading Express™ program. In this program, University of South Carolina (USC) students and Cocky travel across the state visiting elementary schools along the way. Cocky, a gamecock, is the mascot for USC. During visits of the reading express, Cocky assists USC students in reading books by acting out the story (this is because Cocky cannot speak). Cocky also helps by giving books to children and asks everyone that gets a book to promise to read to everyone they know. The Executive director of SCCCBL, Ellen Hinrichs, plans the logistics of the trips. She is responsible for the long-term funding of the program and its continued vision.
Cocky and the students make a big impact on the schools by creating excitement and a love of reading through storytelling. However given limited resources and time, reaching all schools in the state of SC is practically impossible. While physical visits to every school might be impractical, a digital library would be available all the time for students and educators to explore. It is for these reasons that this project started. With this background in mind relevant theories and research approaches from the literature were explored.
The work Dillon & Gabbard (1998) of should remind us that we need to be careful to separate the promise of technology from the actual results. More specifically, the work of Chen & Chao (2008) indicate that results are inconclusive when performing reading and learning tasks in digital environments.
Factors like information overload, Chen (2005); complexity of interface design for children, Hutchinson, Druin, & Bederson (2007); stakeholder attitudes toward adoption and acceptance of new learning technologies; and completion of tasks by groups in virtual environments (Balthazard, Potter, & Warren, 2004; Hall & Gordon, 1998; Jones & Rafaeli, 1999; Kahai, Carroll, & Jestice, 2007; Lowry, Roberts, Romano Jr, Cheney, & Hightower, 2006; Peterson, 2006; Quentin, 2000) may explain why reading with technology is a more difficult process than reading without technology.
While these findings are important to digital libraries, there needs to be an operating framework or theory on which to base this current research. In particular there needs to be a framework that guides the design process and a framework that guides the basic research question being proposed through this study. Sumner & Marlino (2004) outlines why frameworks are important for digital libraries; in sum digital libraries face challenges related to their evaluation of outcomes and challenges to theories which can move the field forward.
Whittaker, Terveen, & Nardi (2000)’s reference task agenda presents a specific design framework in which the current project can be situated. Reference tasks are important tasks that are based on one or more of the following criteria; first, the reference task must be performed frequently; second, it must be critical; third, the task must be based on evidence from users and fourth the task must not be in danger of becoming obsolete. The strength of the reference task agenda is in the community that disseminates findings, defines important tasks, and replicates important studies. In this case some community building may need to occur in order to reap the full benefits of the framework. This would involve gathering partners from LIS, computer science, educational technology, education, psychology and other interested disciplines.
Despite the absence of an active LIS community engaged in understanding the tasks of early readers in digital libraries or understanding how educators teach early readers, there is still some work that can be done before this community develops. Specifically, we can summarize what we know about the reading process and how educators try to teach reading. That will be the focus for the rest of this section.
One important line of research are the studies that focus on the ability of children to read books on computer displays and in distributed Web environments. Quinn, Chang, Arisaka, Rose, & Bederson (2008) investigated the readability of scanned books and found that of four modes of interacting with books (ClearText, PopoutText, Standard, Book); users preferred the ClearText interface that the researchers had developed. In the ClearText interface, the text is separated from the page of the book so that users can increase and decrease the font size of the text. This interface is an advance for information systems because the resolutions of traditionally scanned book pages make it difficult to read the passages of the book.
The work of Bernard, Chaparro, Mills, & Halcomb (2002) measured the reading speed, perceived ease of reading, perceived speed of reading, perceived typeface attractiveness, typeface preference and desire to use typeface of four different display fonts for twenty-seven participants whose ages ranged from nine to eleven year old. The researchers investigated the following four fonts: Times, Courier, Arial, and Comic. 14 point Arial and 12-point Comic were preferred the most out of the combinations studied with Courier being the only font that produced a significant negative effect on reading speed and accuracy.
With respect to the four criteria for judging relevance tasks the readability of text on the screen arguably is one, critical and two, a task that must be performed frequently. Since our system will be delivered via computers this will be an important variable for future studies to keep track of but one that is beyond the scope of this initial study.
Other important findings, like the work of Schmid, Miodrag, & Di Francesco (2008), suggest that any tool that is implemented must be done so in conjunction with human support. Intuitively it makes sense that early readers need tutors, teachers, coaches, parents guiding them through appropriate use of the learning software to help them mature as readers. This finding is further stressed by the work of McEneaney, Lose, & Schwartz (2006) which argues that deficit and discrepancy model views of reading difficulties have not aided us in learning how to better support struggling readers; instead, their view is that we need focus on the critical role that teachers play in aiding their students to achieve.
With respect to models of cognition and reading, this work assumed that educators of all kinds are critical the process of learning to read and possess the expert knowledge that will be instrumental in building a new digital library focused on engaging early learners in the reading process. Using their feedback, guidelines for future educational digital libraries can be developed which outline important tasks and features of a reading digital library. The aim of this study is to focus specifically on the resources that educators use. In particular, this research identified the Web resources educators used in the process of teaching reading and investigated the positive and negative characteristics of both paper and Web resources. Later research will address the selection of reading tasks, choice of metrics to evaluate tasks and the lessons learned from using the reference task agenda.
A survey was administered to reading recovery teachers, literacy coordinators, library media specialists and other educators primarily from the state of SC. This research investigated the types of information currently used by educators to assist with the reading process. Participants were identified from the various contacts within the following organizations: South Carolina Department for Public Instruction, the South Carolina Center for Children’s Books and Literacy, the South Carolina Association for School Librarians, the School of Education and the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina. The distribution of the survey using such a variety of networks served two primary goals. The first reason for such a wide distribution was to collect information that would provide an accurate picture of online reading resource use regardless of population and the second was to solicit participants from a variety of populations to participate in the follow up focus group study portion of this research. The survey was distributed on October 15th, 2008 and survey results will continue to be collected until November 20th, 2008.
As of November 14th 2008, 20 participants had viewed and read the consent form for the Web based survey. Of that number, 11 people continued to fill out the survey completely. 10 participants were female and one participant was male. Three participants were in the 50 to 54 age range; two participants were in the 55 to 59 age range; two participants were in the 30 to 34 age range; and one participant was in each of the following age ranges 20 to 25, 45 to 49, 60 to 64 and 65 and above. In terms of race 10 responses were Caucasian participants and 1 response was from an African American participant. Eight participants had backgrounds in library and media specialist fields, one participant’s subject area was reading, one participant’s subject area was information literacy and one participant selected not applicable to this question. The participants in the survey served a variety of grade levels. Four participants served 4th to 5th grade; three participants served 9th to 12th grade; two participants served Kindergarten to 1st grade; one person indicated they served Kindergarten to 5th grade and one person indicated they were a teacher of three children/stay at home mom.
Participants responded in a variety of ways when they were asked about their use of paper resources to supplement reading. Mentioned most frequently were leveled texts, books, magazines, weekly newspapers, and specific book series like the Blueford novels. Other responses focused on the professional development aspect of teaching reading. These responses highlighted journal articles and books that were aimed at keeping educators informed of the latest reading techniques and theories.
When asked what they liked about paper resources, the participants mentioned characteristics like “high interest” for their children, the ability to cover subjects in a “nonpedantic manner” and the ability to move children through progressive levels of book difficulty.
When asked what they disliked about paper resources, participants referred to characteristics such as how current the collection was, the durability of the resources, the necessity to have more copies within their collections, and the amount of space the paper resources take up.
When asked specifically about the Web sites they used to supplement reading, educators mentioned Digital Information For South Carolina Users (DISCUS) products, Tumblebooks, ICDL, Compass Learning, Starfall, teachingbooks.net, www.readinga-z.com, Verizon’s Thinkfinity, PBS, and a variety of sites like Disney Kids.
Web sites had many positive factors that were reoccurring among the participant answers. In particular participants indicated Web resources to be reliable, current, accurate, engaging, and easy to use.
Participants also had negative comments about the Web resources they used. One participant indicated they had connection issues . Another had trouble printing text from the Web resource so their students could read the material in the class room. Other negative characteristics associated with Web resources were subscription costs, the lack of new content being regularly added, and the reinforcement of learning as a game.
Of the digital libraries reviewed prior to this study the participants mentioned only Tumblebooks and the ICDL.
The result of this preliminary study paints an interesting digital landscape of the Web resources used within the state of SC. Although this study is limited by a small sample size of participants the results highlight that there is currently only one LIS project which strives to provide children with the experience of digital books. While it is not surprising educators use a variety of books, magazines, and news papers to meet their needs, participants reported that paper resources took up space, were not current and did not have enough copies to be used by multiple readers. While technology does not solve all of these problems, it does enhance the choices that educators have at their disposal and should be investigated further so that educators have more high quality resources that are low cost/free.
The argument and call presented in this paper suggests that future research of digital libraries focus on the achievement gap and in finding ways to design libraries that support educators and early readers in search of good books and resources to use on the Web.
If you are an LIS professional or lover of reading you might ask yourself: why is LIS not leading the way in the distribution, innovation and research of digital books for children?
http://www.icdlbooks.org
http://www.princeton.edu/cotsen/
http://www.archive.org/details/iacl
http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/UFDC/UFDC.aspx?c=juv
http://www.fairrosa.info/
http://www.tumblebooks.com/library/asp/home_tumblebooks.asp
http://www.thegateway.org/
http://nsdl.org/
http://mathforum.org/
http://www.libsci.sc.edu/ccbl/index.htm
References
Balthazard, P., Potter, R.E., & Warren, J. (2004). Expertise, extraversion and group interaction styles as performance indicators in virtual teams: how do perceptions of IT's performance get formed? ACM SIGMIS Database, 35(1).
Bernard, M.L., Chaparro, B.S., Mills, M.M., & Halcomb, C.G. (2002). Examining children's reading performance and preference for different computer-displayed text. Behaviour & Information Technology, 21(2), 87-96.
Chen, C.-Y. (2005, 2005). Managing perceptions of information overload in computer-mediated communication, from http://hdl.handle.net/1969/1370
Chen, G.D., & Chao, P.Y. (2008). Augmenting traditional books with context-aware learning supports from online learning communities. Educational Technology & Society, 11(2), 27-40.
Dillon, A., & Gabbard, R. (1998). Hypermedia as an educational technology: A review of the quantitative research literature on learner comprehension, control, and style. Review of Educational Research, 68(3), 322-349.
Hall, L., & Gordon, A. (1998). A virtual learning environment for entity relationship modelling. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 30(1).
Hutchinson, H.B., Druin, A., & Bederson, B.B. (2007). Supporting elementary-age children's searching and browsing: Design and evaluation using the international children's digital library. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(11), 1618-1630.
Jones, Q., & Rafaeli, S. (1999). User population and user contributions to virtual publics: a systems model. GROUP '99: Proceedings of the international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work ; ACM.
Kahai, S.S., Carroll, E., & Jestice, R. (2007). Team collaboration in virtual worlds. ACM SIGMIS Database, 38(4).
Lowry, P.B., Roberts, T.L., Romano Jr, N.C., Cheney, P.D., & Hightower, R.T. (2006). The Impact of Group Size and Social Presence on Small-Group Communication. Small Group Research, 37(6), 631(631).
McEneaney, J.E., Lose, M.K., & Schwartz, R.M. (2006). A Transactional Perspective on Reading Difficulties and Response to Intervention. Reading Research Quarterly, 41(1), 117-128.
Peterson, M. (2006). Learner interaction management in an avatar and chat-based virtual world. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 19(1), 79(24).
Quentin, J. (2000). An empirical investigation of boundaries to virtual public discourse structure. CHI '00: CHI '00 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems ; ACM.
Quinn, A.J., Chang, H., Arisaka, T., Rose, A., & Bederson, B.B. (2008). Readability of scanned books in digital libraries, Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. Florence, Italy: ACM.
Schmid, R.F., Miodrag, N., & Di Francesco, N. (2008). A human-computer partnership: the tutor/child/computer triangle promoting the acquisition of early literacy skills.(Report). Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 41(1), 63(22).
Sumner, T., & Marlino, M. (2004). Digital libraries and educational practice: a case for new models, Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries. Tuscon, AZ, USA: ACM.
Whittaker, S., Terveen, L., & Nardi, B.A. (2000). Let's Stop Pushing the Envelope and Start Addressing It: A Reference Task Agenda for HCI. Human-Computer Interaction, 15(2/3), 75-106.
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