Technology for Cross-Cultural Communication in a Children's International Book Community

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Every day news media report misunderstandings, intolerance or outright aggression between people from different cultures. Age-old disputes over land, water, religious and cultural practices fuel intolerance. Children absorb the ambiance, culture and attitudes of their community. Consequently, cycles of intolerance pass from generation to generation. But there is some hope for change: research has shown that sharing personal experiences can change attitudes. When it comes to developing tolerance, early intervention is best. The multicultural education literature highlights the effectiveness of children interacting with children from other cultural groups, as well as reading children's literature from other cultures. The aim of this project is to develop technology and social structures needed for children who speak different languages to learn with and from each other in a digital community setting centered on children's books. The PIs will address two closely linked technical challenges. The first is the design of child-friendly user interfaces to support online interaction and communication between children; this will be addressed via cooperative inquiry, in which design teams (including researchers and child participants) gather field data, initiate ideas, and test and develop new prototypes. The second is the problem of translation; this will be addressed by involving the communicating children themselves as collaborative participants in an innovative approach to developing language technology resources that support cross-language communication without full-scale machine translation. A combination of methods will be used to evaluate the proposed research. Data to be gathered in classrooms will include understanding changes in how children from different cultures use new technologies to communicate, interpret stories, develop collaborative narratives, and see other cultures. This research will leverage the ongoing NSF ITR-funded International Children's Digital Library (ICDL), with which the PIs are involved, in order to provide access to books that create common ground for children's "ICDL communities." This project will add value to ICDL by contributing technologies that give children who speak different languages an opportunity to interact. The intellectual merit of this research includes: new interfaces that enable children who speak different languages to communicate safely with each other in ways that are comfortable for them; advances in translation technology; and evaluation of the impact of children's experiences in ICDL communities. Broader Impacts: The broad impacts deriving from this research include two significant contributions: a model online community using technology to advance the cause of tolerance and understanding; and a technology test-bed that will be made available to the scientific community in order to lower the barriers to entry for further development of cross-cultural online communities for children and adults.