Supporting sociable literacy in the international children's digital library

Abstract

As each generation of children grows up in a world shaped by the affordances available to them in both physical and digital environments, their expectations of tools to support changing literacy practices make new demands on technologists and designers. To ensure that digital libraries (DLs) for young people support their understandings of libraries and reading (and not just adults' conceptions), an intergenerational design team (IDT) at the University of Baltimore (UB) used contextual inquiry and participatory design to develop concepts for augmenting the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) to make it more appropriate for 10-14 year olds. Our prototype aims to support "sociable literacy," a set of practices made possible by digital storage, retrieval and use of texts.