A Collaborative Digital Library for Children: A Descriptive Study of Children's Collaborative Behavior and Dialogue

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Date
2003-01-21Author
Druin, Allison
Revelle, Glenda
Bederson, Benjamin B.
Hourcade, Juan Pablo
Farber, Allison
Lee, Juhyun
Campbell, Dana
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Show full item recordAbstract
Over the last three years, we have been developing a collaborative digital
library interface where two children can collaborate using multiple mice on a
single computer to access multimedia information concerning animals. This
technology, called "SearchKids" leverages our lab's past work in co-present
collaborative zoomable interfaces for young children. This paper describes the
differences in children's collaborative behavior and dialogue when using two
different software conditions to search for animals in the digital library. In
this study, half the children had to "confirm" their collaborative activities
(e.g., both children had to click on a given area to move to that area). The
other half used an "independent" collaboration technique (e.g., just one mouse
click allows the pair to move to that area). The participants in this study were 98 second and third grade children (ages 7-9 years old) from a suburban public
elementary school in Prince George's County, Maryland. The children were
randomly divided into two groups and paired with a classmate of the same gender.
Each pair was asked to find as many items as possible from a list of 20 items
given a limit of 20 minutes. Sessions were video taped and the first and last
five minutes of each session were coded for discussion type and frequency. The
results of our study showed distinct differences between groups in how children
discussed their shared goals, collaborative tasks, and what outcomes they had in
successfully finding multimedia information in the digital library. These
findings suggest various ways educators might use and technologists might develop new collaborative technologies for learning.
Keywords
Children, Collaboration, Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, Digital
Libraries, Educational Applications, Single Display Groupware (SDG), SearchKids,
Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs)
(UMIACS-TR-2002-46)
(HCIL-TR-2002-07)