Annotated Bibliography Assignment

By Brianna Barriga-Sardinas, Letters from Felix: A Virtual Reality

 1. Bain, Alan. The learning edge :  what technology can do to educate all children. New York : Teachers College Press, 2012. Print. 

In this resource, Alan Bain and his colleague Mark Weston examine the ways in which technology (specifically information and communication technology or ICT in their words) impacts or can impact education. They explore the way that technology can affect both the educators and the students at various levels of education. The authors believe that technology provides really positive and interesting ways for learning to take place, especially in a way that can be collaborative. This resource is great for our project because one of our goals is to take this text and make it more informational, educational, and collaborative/immersive through a technological format. Bain's study is interesting in that it analyzes both educators and students, which in our case could apply to the parents/guardians as educators and the children as students (though parents could also potentially be expanding their own knowledge and become students in the process as well). Another important part of this study is that is studies many levels of education and not just one specific one. This range of educational levels can show how our project can potentially affect children at different levels of education and possibly help to discover which education level our project meshes the best with in order to maximize learning. 

2. Dill, Karen E., ed. The Oxford handbook of media psychology. New York : Oxford University Press, 2013. Print. 

The Oxford Handbook of Media Psychology explores different aspects of media and the impact they have on the way someone acts, thinks, and feels. The different aspects span from media violence and desensitization to said violence, sexual content, video game violence, portrayals of race and gender, and most importantly in this case children's media use. They further study physical/heath effects experienced from exposure to certain medias and the occurrence of technological addictions. This resources applies to our project because of our focus on a children's work that we are reinterpreting into something that is digital and multimedia. The study provides a look at the impacts that this action that we take could have on a child's development. A child's development is critical as it is a time where they can be heavily molded and influenced. Actions, thoughts, and emotions can all be part of this development and knowing how technology is impacting these things and in a broader sense a child's development is something that is extremely important to look at since these impacts could stretch way past childhood. Again, a question arises about our project in connection with this work: will changing a traditional physical book into this multimedia virtual reinterpretation negatively affect the way a child acts, thinks, feels, and possibly develops as a person? 

3. Gardner, Howard. The app generation : how today's youth navigate identity, intimacy, and imagination in a digital world. New Haven : Yale University Press, 2013. Print. 

Howard Gardner and his colleague Katie Davis explore the relationship between the current day youth and technology. Their work explores the phenomenon of how young people have developed a relationship with technology, what this relationship means, and the consequences of such a relationship. As the title states, the authors analyze technology and the impact it has on identity, intimacy, and imagination. The authors compare the negatives and positive that these technological relationships and dependency. These findings appear to be both opposing and yet stable in their own ways. For example, this can be shown through the results of the studies that find that technology can both “stunt creative imagination” and “stimulate creativity.” This resource parallels with our project in that it explores the relationship of young people and technology which we are interested in learning more about as a group. In transforming and reinterpreting this text into a virtual online format we are playing into this technology/youth relationship that Gardner and Davis studied. Of particular importance is the fact that the authors examined the specific impact that technology has on a person's ability to imagine or imagination as whole. The intimacy aspect, though not one that we had talked about as explicitly as imagination, can also apply to our project as well due to the fact that children's books are traditionally read by a guardian/parent to the child. The study begs a question of our own work: will our reinterpretation be part of the technology that stunts or encourages creative imagination? 

4. Mullenweg, Matt. WordPress. Web. 5 Nov 2013. 

WordPress (http://wordpress.com/) is a blogging website that allows users to create and mediate their own blogs. Though the site/program has premium features that cost extra, it is technically free which makes it extremely accessible to anyone with an internet connection and/or computer. A key feature is the ability to publicize your blog through other websites and social networks, therefore expanding your audience and extending the information out further into the world. This resource is particularly important because it might potentially serve as the base of the entire project as we are mirroring a book or genre of book through a blog/virtual reality format. With this resource, the group is able to express our reinterpretations through multimedia (text, audio, photo, video, etc), which is fairly vital because it aids in creating a more extensive and immersive version of a physical book. The ability to add tags to each of these different types of medias is also a great way to help organize each country or category of information, which is not only helpful to the site administrators but also to site visitors who want to further their knowledge on a subject they found particularly captivating. The latter is also something that you cannot really accomplish in a physical book, or at least not in the same way.

5. WorldMap. Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University, 2011.  Web. 5 Nov 2013.

WorldMap (http://worldmap.harvard.edu/ ) is a resource that allows the user to “explore, visualize, edit, collaborate with, and publish geospatial information.” With this application, the user can create their own map that can adhere to their own specifications. The user can choose different types of layouts with which to lay as the base for whichever area is being explored. Once this base has been established, the user can add different layers that add to information displayed or which emphasize whatever the user would like to emphasize. The resource even allows information like statistics and data sets to be uploaded and overlapped on the maps as well. Another interesting feature is the ability to link to a flickr account. The feature is a way to take something that can be seen as very methodological and precise and instead make it more personal, which can lead to a more emotional connection to whatever the map is displaying. Though WorldMap may not seem to be the best choice for our project since it may not be particularly child-friendly or appealing, the abilities that it seems to possess provide an interesting platform that is worth exploring. The fact that our text is based off of traveling across the entire world and exploring each of these unique places links quite well with this application. The ability to layer and expand information about a specific place with this application is one of the main purposes of this project: taking a children's book and reinterpreting it with a more scholarly point of view. While we also aim to keep it child-friendly, this expansion of information is also vital and this resource has the potential to aid in such types of informational expansion.