Parents' and Childrens' Engagement When Sharing Personalised Books

This study aimed to compare parents’ and children’s engagement during shared book reading of a personalised, non-personalised and a favourite book. A within-subjects comparison of seven native English parents and their children aged between 12 and 33 months was performed, with a multi-method design in order to cross-validate the findings. Data from parents’ questionnaire reports, interviews and field notes, indicated high levels of children’s engagement with the personalised books. Video observations showed higher specific engagement levels for children when comparing the personalised with nonpersonalised book and for parents also with the child’s favourite book. There was most correspondence between parents’ and children’s engagement in the personalised book condition. The results suggest that personalised books foster a joint, specific engagement in parents and children and this is probably due to the personal information they contain. A multimethod assessment proved to be an effective technique to adequately address the multifaceted nature of parents’ and children’s engagement in sharing different types of books

Book review: Artificial intimacy: virtual friends, digital lovers and algorithmic matchmakers by Rob Brooks

In Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers and Algorithmic Matchmakers, Rob Brooks explores how new digital technologies are changing our experiences of intimacy and social interactions. While the book provides an excellent historic overview of how sexual practices change in tandem with technological advances, Natalia Kucirkova questions whether it fully grapples with the social issues and ethical questions raised by these transformations. Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers and Algorithmic Matchmakers. Rob Brooks. Columbia University Press. 2021

Socio-material directions for developing empirical research on children’s e-reading: A systematic review and thematic synthesis of the literature across disciplines

This review integrates literature on cross-disciplinary quantitative and qualitative studies related to children’s reading on screen published between January 2016 and September 2017, with a focus on the researchers’ epistemological perspectives on knowledge and learning. Johri’s (2011) framework of socio-material assemblages, which synthesises epistemological dualities, is used to examine the ways in which researchers conceptualise children’s learning with digital books. The review shows that extant empirical studies map directly onto the social part of Johri’s framework (examination of child and adult variables and behavioural characteristics) and onto the material aspects of children’s digital books (examination of books’ contents and features). Only theoretical studies pay equal attention to social and material aspects in their conceptualisation of children’s reading on screen. Overall, it is recommended that in addition to cross-disciplinary and multiple methods, researchers consider socio-material assemblages to advance the field. A socio-material perspective could address time and space shifts in children’s reading on screen and might provide a springboard for future epistemological developments within the field

Book review: Artificial intimacy: virtual friends, digital lovers and algorithmic matchmakers by Rob Brooks

In Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers and Algorithmic Matchmakers, Rob Brooks explores how new digital technologies are changing our experiences of intimacy and social interactions. While the book provides an excellent historic overview of how sexual practices change in tandem with technological advances, Natalia Kucirkova questions whether it fully grapples with the social issues and ethical questions raised by these transformations. Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers and Algorithmic Matchmakers. Rob Brooks. Columbia University Press. 2021

In search for creative and embedded research impact

Funding agencies are increasingly seeking to promote more non-linear developmental approaches to research impact. In this post, Natalia Kucirkova, discusses how her research on children’s story making apps presents a useful way for thinking about research impact that is embedded within the communities where it will be most beneficial. Highlighting the particular challenges and opportunities presented by this type of research, she suggests that work remains to be done to support such research sustainably

Digital Personalization in Early Childhood

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Digital personalization is an emerging interdisciplinary research field, with application to a variety of areas including design, education and publication industry. This book focuses on children’s education and literacy resources, which have undergone important changes with the ‘personalization revolution’ in the early 21st century. The author develops original insights from educational research and her own studies concerned with digital and non-digital personalization, to discuss in a clear and critical way the thinking, research issues and practical implications of this new field. She scrutinises the character of technology-based personalized education to substantiate the claim that the current models of personalized education tend to be technology- and business-driven, with little pedagogical understanding of the social value of personalization. Research involving touchscreens, personalized books and 2-8-year olds is interrogated for its impact on children’s development of language, creativity, identity, as well as family dynamics and classroom dialogue. The literature available on digital and non-digital personalization is discussed in relation to five key themes of personalized education, the so-called 5As: autonomy, authorship, aesthetics, attachment and authenticity. It is argued that the 5As need to be anchored in humanist principles for a sustainable pedagogy and practice. Based on the insights from research with typically and atypically developing children, Kucirkova proposes personalised pluralisation, as a pedagogical framework of personalized education for the future. The book aims to help scholars and professionals understand the connections between personalization and literacy, personalization and education, and personalization and wider socio-moral issues

Children’s stories and multisensory engagement: insights from a cultural probes study

This study builds on child-centred early education models that emphasise active listening to children's voices and follow participatory research methods to accommodate children's expressions. We used the cultural probes method with eleven Norwegian 4-5-year-olds to elicit children's storytelling and multisensory engagement. The children were encouraged to tell a story using open-ended art-making materials provided in a “story box”. Children's stories were analysed according to their structural elements with The Social Relationships in Children's Stories (SRCS) tool, and in relation to the intensity of children's engagement of their six senses (vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste and proprioception) during the activity. The SRCS analysis showed that children's stories centred on real characters performing commonly encountered acts, mostly in rural settings (e.g., ‘a man pushing a tree’ or ‘A mother and a baby relaxing in the forest’). Children engaged their senses selectively, in a sequence of different levels of intensity, with the visual and haptic engagement being the most intensively engaged senses during the story-tellings. Children's real-life stories that engage the hidden senses (olfaction, taste and proprioception) could enrich the methods and design of future education studies.publishedVersio

Percolating spaces:creative ways of using digital technologies to connect young children’s school and home lives

Contemporary research suggests there are many missed opportunities for home and school to work together to define and promote effective practices with digital technologies, especially in early years. This study outlines ways in which one Early Years classroom creatively promoted bidirectional connections between children’s learning with technologies at home and in school. Nested in a posthumanist perspective on space and classroomness (Burnett, 2014), the study illuminates the complex spatial entanglement among home, school and technologies in the form of enhanced vignettes. As a space-based interpretive case study that emerged from a larger project, the data collection methods revolved around a set of two visits by each researcher, one year apart, plus analyses of school documentation and online interactions. We integrate diverse data sources to argue that innovative, multimodal practices of teaching, learning and assessment can be designed and implemented imaginatively, deploying a range of digital technologies to connect with children’s and parents’ home lives. Use of multimedia affordances of technologies, attention to children’s physical and material interactions with resources and strategic school policy made it possible for influences to percolate between home and school, to the enhancement of children’s learning in the moment

Call for regulation on securing children’s data in personalised reading

While children’s reading experience is being transformed with digital reading formats, personalised and interactive books allowing for more personalisation, there are risks around the data this releases. Natalia Kucirkova and Rosie Flewitt identify four main areas of concern and call for regulation. Natalia is Senior Research Associate, and Rosie is Reader in Early Communication and Learning, both at University College London, Institute of Education. [Header image credit: B. Flickinger, CC BY 2.0_08]

Understanding parents’ conflicting beliefs about children’s digital book reading

In light of growing evidence that many parents are deeply concerned about their young children’s increasing technology use, in this paper we report on aspects of a study funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, where we sought to understand parents’ views on children’s digital book reading. We introduced seven families to four award-winning digital books (story apps and e-books), observed how the mothers mediated their children’s digital book reading over a period of several weeks and subsequently interviewed the mothers about their shared reading experiences with the digital books. Focusing on the interview data and drawing on the theoretical framework of socio-materiality, this paper reports on how parents’ views about digital book features were entangled with their social perceptions of the value of digital reading. Analysis of parents’ accounts show three conflicted themes of trust/mistrust, agency/dependency and nostalgia/realism in parental attitudes towards their children’s reading on screens. The paper concludes with a discussion of how these findings regarding the unresolved dichotomies inherent in parental views about their children’s digital reading are highly relevant for future research on parental mediation of their children’s learning with digital media