Design recommendations for the development of a Digital Storytelling mobile application

This paper focuses on the educational benefits of Digital Storytelling (DST) in the context of a primary school and on the importance of a DST application that supports teaching strategies and pedagogical objectives (as defined by the school curriculum). The work presented here is part of a 4-year longitudinal study aimed at understanding how to design an application that supports collaborative DST as educational practice in schools with children aged 6 to 11. In this paper, we describe how a typical case study has been conducted and how we used the Narrative Activity Model (NAM) as a framework to guide the activity analysis and to organize our findings. The result is a set of users' needs and guidelines for the development of an innovative DST application to be used in a formal learning context. © The Authors

Understanding reading experience to inform the design of eBooks for children

In this work in progress paper we explore the many facets and activities that contribute to the definition of reading experience, in particular when considering children as readers of electronic books (eBooks). We aim at understanding the importance of reading context and book choice as part of the reading experience in order to set up the main steps of a User-Centered Design (UCD) process that will result in innovative models and interfaces for more engaging children's eBooks. © 2012 ACM

Who was that? Enriched eReading through in-book visualisation

The shift to electronic books has opened a realm of possibilities for assisting users in reading books, but little of this potential has been realised. Today’s eReaders offer simple search features but rarely make any ongoing supportive data about a book’s content available. We investigated the use of visual aids for eBook reading and developed an eReader prototype. Our prototype provides a timeline of character appearances throughout a book, coupled with interactive identifications and lists of characters as they appear within the narrative. We present results of a user study in which we observe that contextually-relevant information can enhance a reader’s experience