From Ulaan Baatar to iPhone: A Digital Library for the World’s Children Ben Bederson Computer Science Department Human-Computer Interaction Lab University of Maryland

“Once upon a time a huge tribe of cats lived in a remote village. A river divided the village in two. Black cats lived on one bank and blonde cats lived on the other… In summer and autumn, a black cat ruled the village and in spring and winter, a blonde cat ruled the village. ” -Black ears … blonde ears (2002)

“ I think you can hear me now. If you are all willing to listen to each other, we will be able to solve our problems. Only when you can do that will we be happy and able to live in peace.” -Black ear … blonde ear (2002) in The Tamer Institute for Community Education, Palestine by Khaled Jumm’a, Illustrated by Foutinie Dedwase

International Children’s Digital Library research led by the UMD 3,000,000 unique visitors books in 51 languages website in 16 languages 150,000 pages of digitized books 100,000 visitors per month now a non-profit foundation users in 200+ countries

Children’s Libraries Many schools are without books Or books in the right languages Printing is expensive Scaling up is challenging Technology can be a solution…

Demo

Canadian retired teacher leads non-profit group electronic & physical materials South African rural communities to teach in supports pre-school children ICDL contributes uses to this initiative

Taiwanese t eachers support working mothers & English taught as a 2 nd language their children… ICDL is tool for 2 nd language ICDL books used to read/write their own stories acquisition

Romanian class translates books on bullies half the class translates a book ICDL supports translation the other half reviews & language acquisition translations work

4-Country, 4-Year Study Children, teachers, librarians, parents in Honduras, Germany, New Zealand, USA participated Case study methods were used to understand how children changed in their attitudes towards books, technology & world views

Children’s motivation to read was increased with the ICDL Children read more diverse books… Children’s confidence with technology increased… Children’s world view expanded… 4-Country, 4-Year Study

Teacher’s Domain - WGBH

Mongolia Working with Ministry of Education Funded by World Bank Adding digital access to traditional literacy project Phase I – Urban Phase II – Rural Phase III – Mobile

December 2006

OLPC & ICDL First pilot now Thousands of laptops in schools ICDL on every laptop Goal: 200,000 laptops to all children

Readability

Demo

Textbox Workflow 1,000 translation volunteers => 75 proofing automated output 25,000 pages proofed in 15 days Similar to automated process!

experiment read ½ book each with… physical book standard ClearText PopoutText 27 adults The Blue Sky Ciconia …are these any good ?

ClearText

A Book on Every Device Let the library follow you Mobile phones are everywhere Capacity is growing very fast

Create Stories on a Phone Physical world Record and share => Creative expression for education

Mobile Relationships Gives distribution Supports collaboration Go where the kids are Social change in acceptance

Future Directions Distributed Human Computation (DHC) Combine –machine translation –monolingual speakers => 10,000 books in 100 languages each

Translation as Collaboration

Language as a Redundant Code Model language as an error detecting and correcting code Transmit through a “noisy channel”

Language as a Redundant Code 1.Errors detectable and correctable “I has cheezburger” => “I have a cheesburger”

Language as a Redundant Code 1.Errors detectable and correctable 2.Errors detectable, not correctable “I have cheeseburger” ?=> “I have a cheesburger” ?=> “I have cheeseburgers”

Language as a Redundant Code 1.Errors detectable and correctable 2.Errors detectable, not correctable Support communication And shared cultural context

Language as a Redundant Code 1.Errors detectable and correctable 2.Errors detectable, not correctable 3.Errors not detectable “I have a cheeseburger.”

Language as a Redundant Code 1.Errors detectable and correctable 2.Errors detectable, not correctable 3.Errors not detectable Add redundancy to convert errors to type 2

Translation as Collaboration

Preliminary results: –Left: Monolingual humans improve MT –Right: Multiple passes improve results Translation as Collaboration

future mobile of HCI huge natural language (and vision) physical computing context awareness user social networks generated content privacy awareness

greater… shipping books are difficult the needs of the world have never been 20 th century models of &expensive educational services & materials access to has declined intolerance & prejudice children are continues…

ICDL Acknowledgements … Co-Directors: Allison Druin, Ann Weeks, Tim Browne Current ICDL team, Anne Rose, Sheri Massey, Evan Golub, Anita Komlodi, Jenny Preece, Weiman Hou, Dana, Tara, Jonah, Stephan, Sam, Ruby, Oska, Mamae, Camille, Sonovia, Devin, Chamira, Alberto, Alma, Jose Raul, Grace, Max, Sarah Funding: National Science Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Intel, Gov’t of Mongolia, Microsoft Corp., Elias Foundation, Adobe Corp.