jcdl 6: educational digital libraries

[deborah]

The next panel I attended was Educational Digital Libraries. All but the first of these papers were short papers, which might be why it's primarily the first paper I found interesting, in that first paper was more personally than professionally interesting.

Children's Interests and Concenrs When Using the International Children's Digital Library: a Four Country Case Study (Druin, Weeks, massey, bederson)

The International Children's Digital Library did a study to find out children's use patterns and the effect of using the Children's Digital Library on their library use, reading, and information seeking behaviors. They noted that children, worldwide, are the most frequent adopters of technology.

The ICDL uses a different search mechanism from a standard digital library, based on their studies showing children's use patterns. They have an icon -based four axis matrix indicated by images: colors, topics, length, age-range, with a language chooser dropdown. Other matrixes are possible.

The child users didn't necessarily want practicality, they wanted something different and exciting and new in their UI. (So there is a bizarre page-turning mechanism which makes adults dizzy but was exciting to the children.) Interestingly, even after time passed they still wanted the shiny and exciting and new, even when it was no longer knew.

Their study was a 4-year longitudinal qualitative study in a field with no prior research: 12 children, 12 parents, 6 teachers, 6 librarians, 4 principals, 2 public, 2 private, private International Baccaleureate school in honduras (monocultural), public school in Wellington NZ (multicultural), inner-city chicago (monocultural), international school in Munich. These schools were chosen to be extremes of education, not representational. Clearly they cannot draw broad conclusions from this pilot study, and they acknowledge that.

Each child got a tablet PC with a local copy of the ICDL. Each child was required to read books, right reviews, be interviewed, and draw ideas. So the measurable data are book reviews, drawings, transcripts.

Findings:

• Given free choice, the American children would not read non American books. This was not true for the non-American children.


• Variety of kinds of books that children were willing to read increased over the length of the study.


• Physical books were preferred for reading (not surprising)


• Technology was preferred for searching (not surprising)


• Increased social interaction surrounding reading (Social networking!)


• No change in interest for traditional libraries.


• Increased technological skills and confidence, except in the Munich, where it was strong to begin with. Most dramatic changes among the lower-income children in Wellington and Chicago.


• The technology -- except in Munich, where they already were readers and tech-savvy -- was a carrot motivating the reading.


• Increased interest in other cultures, but only in the two monocultural schools.

Implications of the research:

• Develop diverse digital library materials


• Greatest impact on less tech-savvy, less experience with diversity


• New tools needed


• Computers should live side by side with books in modern libraries; readers want and need both

Digital Library Education in Computer Science Programs (Pomerantz, Oh, Wildemuth, Yang, Fox)

This is another paper about building curricula. This group is trying to produce a series of topics, generate course modules that correspond to 3-hour class sessions, and let professors go crazy with them and give some feedback to live field testing.

They looked at frequency of authors, articles, and journal sources assigned in LIS and CS courses. Very different lists! (Small data set, because too few courses with "digital libraries" in course title or course description, which means Simmons is on the cutting edge of something digital, which boggles my mind.)

A Study of how Online Learning Resources Are Used (Recker, Giersch, Walker, Halioris, Mao, Palmer)

How do we know how our digital libraries are being used in the classroom? Discovery of this is the point of the Digital Libraries Got To School project. They're developing curriculum and training and evaluating in-service and pre-service teachers. They teach the teachers how to use NSDL resources to build and manage learning objects in their tool (Information Architect).

Learning activities are both supported and constrained by the sheer volume of available materials.

Standards or Semantics for Curriculum Search? (Marshall, Reitsma, Cyr)

TeachEngineering project helps teachers find curricula that support local standards. The projected hold a collection of vetted curricular modules.

• Identifying parallel standards across regions to allow transitive, cross-region standards support.


• Someone has to write the crosswalks


• The crosswalks are very difficult to construct accurately or usefully

Information Behavior of Small Groups: Implications for Design of Digital Libraries (Zhou and Stahl)

Many digital librarie are not designed to support learning activities and collaboration, and not organized to accomodate the (not yet understood) younger users. Information practices of students in Virtual Math Teams studied. Students have chatrooms, whiteboards, and learning objects.

They discovered that children negotiate and construct their information needs collaboratively. They rely on the group to help construct and solve information problems.

Conclusion: Digital libraries should support collaboration and broader information practices,

(I'd disagree; I'd think that we need to think more modularly, with digital collections being designed to plug into to collaborative learning tools, and the old distinctions between "library" and "classroom" will be replaced by a modular series of "collection" and various access tools, from traditional digital library front ends to collaborative learning tools.)

Comments

[cavlec.livejournal.com]

When Five Weeks to a Social Library is radical enough to get accepted at ASIST -- yeah, there's an education problem in digital librarianship.

Thanks for these summaries, btw. I am finding them highly useful.