Jenny Preece

They aren’t just small adults: What kids want from an international online book community

Biography
Jenny Preece is Dean of the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. She is author of several books including Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability (John Wiley & Sons, 2000) and Interaction Design: Beyond HCI co-authored with Yvonne Rogers, Helen Sharp (John Wiley & Sons, 2002).

This work is funded by NSF and the project is done in collaboration with Aaron Clamage, Allison Druin, Aaron Elkiss, Anita Komlodi, Sabrina Liao, Philip Resnick.

Position Paper
Children want to interact with technology and with each other. They want to be in control. Challenge is fun and so is communicating with other kids. But how can kids who don’t speak the same language communicate online? What kind of activities transcend language and cultural barriers? What kind of technical and social support is needed?

Our project addresses these and other questions in our quest to bring kids from across the world together to discuss books from an international Children’s digital library. In the process the kids learn words and phrases from each other’s languages and some are motivated to learn a language. But that is not all, at a much deeper level they engage and become intrigued by each other’s cultures. We hope this is a small step towards breaking down cultural barriers and biases.

We have completed two evaluation studies in which kids aged 7-9 years old from Argentina, Hungary and the US exchanged stories and communicated with each other. The findings provide feedback about usability design; how to structure and manage kids’ communication activities online; and fascinating insights about the kinds of scaffolding that kids who do not share a common language and culture need to communicate their stories, ask and answer questions.

One of our many findings is that maintaining identity online is even more important for kids than for adults because they tend to forget who they are talking to. They are also eager to be kept constantly informed about each other’s activities, particularly those of strong interest to them involving such things as: likes and dislikes, toys, family, school events, and holiday activities. They like to compare their experiences with those of the kids from other countries. They particularly like to express themselves through drawings rather than using a preprepared dictionary of images. However, while this is motivating, it creates problems too in that some of the drawings are difficult to interpret. The notion of a temporal sequence in story telling was difficult to grasp and they needed templates to scaffold their story telling. The kinds of usability problems that the kids encountered differed somewhat from those typically associated with adults. For example, dragging and dropping objects was difficult for them because of the fine motor control required to use the tablet pc.

As we complete our analysis more issues are emerging and soon I will post two papers describing these studies on my website.

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