Reading Alone Together: Creating Sociable Digital Library Books

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Reading Alone Together Creating Sociable Digital
Library Books

• Yoram Chisik and Nancy Kaplan
• University of Baltimore

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The ICDL provides easy access to books
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Reading is a social practice
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The net affords new forms of sociability
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Kids are avid users of online social tools
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Marrying online sociability and books can thus
lead to the discovery of old pleasures and the
formation of new ones
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Reading for school vs. reading for fun
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The book as a central place
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Research Questions
Is sociable reading attractive
What kind of social interactions will take place
within the book
Emoticons and their use
Differences between reading for pleasure and work
related collaboration
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Introducing Alph
Developed on the basis of our contextual inquiries
into childrens reading practices and employing
user centered design
Developed in Flash, Java, MySQL and scanned book
pages
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Design Objectives
Support communication among several kinds of
participants
Support the creation of private and public notes
Support cohabitation of many groups in one book
to shield and accommodate the needs of various
user groups
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Demo
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The Field Study
Started out with 16 participants in 6 groups
13 participants in 3 groups actively participated
Groups consisted of kids team members, parents
and friends of the kids
Variation in the level of participation
High percentage of shared (public) notes
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Annotations in use
High interest in the notes with all
readers checking the notes to see what they say
Clustering, placing one icon next to another to
answer a question or respond to a comment
Using the range of emoticons available
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Questions about the meaning of words
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Questions about the activity
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Conversations about the contents
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Conversations about the contents
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Conversations about the contents
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Is sociable reading attractive
Social literacy can be an attractive proposition
to children and their families
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What kind of social interactions will take place
within the book
A full range of interactions from general banter,
through discussions about the content of the
story to questions and comments.
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Emoticons and their use
Readers made effective use of the emoticons
offered by the system matching the icon with the
perceived content of their note
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Differences between reading for pleasure and work
related collaboration
A different set of tools is needed to support
reading for pleasure as opposed to reading
writing as part of a collaborative task oriented
effort
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Need to offer visualization tools that will
enable readers to find annotations independent of
the page they are on
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National Science Foundation
Grant EIA-0203323
The Robert W. Deutsch Foundation
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ychisik_at_ubalt.edu
nkaplan_at_ubalt.edu