to explore what it had to offer them. And so when I returned, I redoubled my efforts to improve the technology to match the real-world challenges of deployment scenarios I saw. We have since improved readability on small screens, added support for transcription and translation, eliminated the need for browser plug-ins, and now we’re even starting to explore how we can support reading books on mobile phones.

And so, this brings us back to where we started. What does it mean for children to read books on computers?

November + December 2008

worse? These fears are founded, and quite possible. But technology is becoming a central part of children’s lives almost everywhere. We can ignore it and hope that children find good things to do with computers on their own, or we can dive into the reality of our children’s lives and build the best technology we can to give them exciting and valuable things to do when they are using that technology.

It is time to deploy the ICDL and other educational technologies widely throughout the rural developing world. Many places have computers but no content,

and they need resources such
as the ICDL. For those without
computers, it may not yet be cost
effective to buy them just for the
books. But computers are being
deployed for other reasons, and
initiatives like the One Laptop
Per Child project are making
them much less expensive. Now
is the time to start experiment-
ing and learning about what is
required to make projects like
the ICDL function effectively.
The ICDL needs your help. Visit
the website to see what you can
do to volunteer.

tripped us up. We were plagued with viruses, power problems, network configuration issues, missing drivers, scratched CDs, and even a lost private key ( needed for encrypting some of the books) that I managed against all odds to leave in Maryland— requiring an extra eight hours of rural driving to get to an Internet connection. But those were just “stupid engineering hurdles” we got past. And then we were able to focus on the amazing situation of working with teachers and children in rural Mongolia, many of whom had very little exposure to computers and none with digital books.

In the months before this rural trip, my biggest fear was that the people I would be trying to help would be uninterested in this technology. What, I wondered, would these people who spend most of their time in exceedingly remote farming situations see in modern computer technology? Would they see an American imperialist, unaware of their needs and actual lives? Would they see technology as something foreign and beyond understanding? Or would they be interested in engaging in this alternative world? Much to my delight, it was clearly the latter. The teachers in the training workshops in every school that we visited were deeply engaged. They skipped lunch breaks and kept us on well past the planned ending times. The schools had welcoming ceremonies with song and dance. And the children were thrilled to have a seemingly unending supply of books and technology, all rolled up together. They clearly saw the broad potential that computers could have in their lives and wanted

Lessons and Conclusion

Perhaps my favorite anecdote that explains what I’ve come to think about children reading books online is from our four-country study. At the beginning of the study, we asked children to draw a picture of themselves reading a book in the ICDL. One little girl drew a picture of a tablet computer in her lap. A year later, we asked them to do the same thing. This same girl drew a picture of a paper book in her lap. She wasn’t playing with a computer anymore. She was reading books.

And this goes to the essence of the potential of technology for children. After the novelty is gone, people go about their business doing what is important to them. And to children, reading stories and understanding the people and world around them is always going to be important. The more access to books and stories we give to children, the more they will engage in them.

But are computers distracting, and is there the potential for children wasting their time, or

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Ben Bederson is an associate professor of computer science and the previous director of the Human-Computer

Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland. His work is on mobile device interfaces, information visualization, interaction strategies, digital libraries, and accessibility issues such as voting-system usability. He is also cofounder and chief scientist of Zumobi, a startup offering a mobile widget platform based on Ben’s research. For more information, visit him at www.cs.umd.edu/~bederson

DOI: 10.1145/1409040.1409053
© 2008 ACM 1072-5220/08/1100 $5.00