Interactions - November/December 2008

and fast access to their library, even when their Internet connections were unreliable.

We observed a number of interesting trends in this study relating to how children read and feel about reading. To begin with, the diversity of available books was greatly appreciated. Children, their parents, and librarians all reported that the easy access to a broad set of books from many cultures intrigued them, and they frequently found themselves reading books that they happened upon—even though they very likely would never have searched them out. This general trend resulted in many children reading an increasing number of books over time. And some children used the easy availability of books to reread the same books over and over again. Interestingly, the single strongest finding in the data was that the children showed increased interest in exploring different cultures. Finally, most of the children reported that while they very much liked the ease of access to the digital books, they still preferred physical books for reading. In explaining this, they referred to ease of navigation, ease of carrying (since the Tablet PCs were significantly heavier than most books), and the risk of carrying expensive computers around in sometimes dangerous urban neighborhoods.

push technology forward in a variety of domains.

And so it was with this context that the ICDL received rights to all 200 Mongolian books, translated the website into Mongolian, and even set up an ICDL mirror server in Ulaan Baatar (at www.read.mn). I literally carried a Dell PowerEdge server with me on my first trip there, and it remains happily installed at a local hosting facility—offering much faster access to the 50 percent of the country that lives in the capital region. My second trip focused on the first pilot of the ICDL in the countryside. Travelling with UMD graduate student Sheri Massey, we set up local ICDL servers in three very rural pilot schools that recently had computer labs set up. The Web server ran on the teacher’s computer, and a local network gave all the classroom computers access to the library through their standard Web browsers. Ironically, these local servers and fast local connections gave these children faster access to the ICDL than anyone in this country who accesses it over a regular Internet connection.

We ran into a wide range of deployment challenges that you might expect from a developing country novice like myself installing a complex technology in such a place. Everything

November + December 2008

With this increased understanding and generally positive feedback, we were ready to respond when we received

a request from the World Bank and the Government of Mongolia to create a Mongolian version of the ICDL, aiming to support rural use. This somewhat unusual opportunity came about because the Mongolian children’s publishing industry collapsed when the country became independent about 20 years ago. With almost no new children’s books being published, the culture of children’s reading for pleasure largely disappeared.

The World Bank chose to fund a general literacy program, which included commissioning 200 new picture books for grades 2-6 that were to be distributed throughout the country, along with teacher training and other activities. They wanted a digital library of those books as well. It may at first seem a questionable choice to spend money on this kind of technology in a developing country where much of the countryside has unreliable electricity and little or no Internet connectivity. However, upon closer examination we saw that only a small part of the overall literacy project was spent on technology. Further, they know that computers are coming throughout the country. They wanted to make sure that there are good activities for children on those computers, and to encourage an increase in technological capacity in the countryside. They also saw the economic impact that technology has had on many of their Asian neighbors (such as Taiwan and Singapore), and want to