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Literacy: Cool, Collaborative, Contagious

Educators are fond of saying that "reading is FUNdamental." But today's kids apparently don't share the same sense of fun. Adolescents, however, do show increasing interest in social interactions, an inclination that finds one of its most powerful outlets in the many forms of social computing now available to and used by a large majority of American teenagers (Lenhart & Madden, 2005). Online interactions may signal a significant shift in the literacy practices of adolescents outside of formal schooling and may seem far more relevant to contemporary life than more traditional settings for and modes of literacy (Leu, Kinzer, Coiro & Cammack, 2004).

The Sociable Literacy Project aims to make reading cool, collaborative, and contagious by embedding traditional reading practices within emerging social computing contexts. Literacy has always been deeply social but reading has most often been considered a solitary activity. The Sociable Literacy Project aims to connect the pleasures of reading alone with the pleasures of companionship and sharing.

Through contextual inquiry and early blue-sky brainstorming with both youngsters and adults, our design team discovered that both reading and managing relations with physical books are highly structured by adults and the demands of schooling even when children are reading for pleasure and as a leisure activity. For example, children are taught never to write in books, especially in school. The children we interviewed and observed do not seem to talk among themselves about books, at least not the ways they talk with each other about their favorite movies and music. Yet when asked to talk to us and each other about what they liked to read and why, they were both articulate and excited about sharing with members of the Intergenerational Design Team.

Our explorations of the International Children's Digital Library led us to investigate how reading online might be able to bring to reading some of the energy and excitement kids bring to sharing other aspects of their culture. Some of the functions and features they wanted and indeed expected from online reading environments included:

  1. Support for school tasks
  2. Enjoyable interactions
  3. Networking with others
  4. Searchable and linkable texts

They expected key functions because of their (already considerable) experience with search engines like Yahoo! Kids, Ask Jeeves, even Google:

  1. Links!
  2. "Fuzzy" searches
  3. A seamless collection of networking, reading and writing tools
  4. And some games thrown in

Our prototype digital reading environment, called Alph, has just begun to incorporate some of the features our research has outlined. Children who have used Alph have found that the social engagement enhanced their pleasure in reading. Analysis of children's annotations and the system's logs demonstrates that the studies' participants were deeply engaged with the novels they were reading but were equally engaged in social exchanges about the stories (Kaplan and Chisik, 2005a; Kaplan and Chisik, 2005b; Kaplan, Chisik, and Levy, 2006).

For more information about our findings, please see our publications.

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