Olé’s Grand Adventure: A Virtual World Tour

By Tiffany Park, Letters From Felix: A Virtual World Tour Team

Abstract

Of all things, technology is one of the most difficult to pin down today because of its ever-increasing rate of advancement.  While technology continues to evolve, human sensory, motor, and attachment systems have biologically not evolved to accommodate this sedentary, yet frenzied and chaotic nature of today’s technology.  The impact of rapidly advancing technology on human brains and developing children, has seen an increase of physical, psychological and behavior disorders that the health and education systems are just beginning to detect, much less understand.  Digital resources as a type of media have unique characteristics that affect how both children and adults are able to use them.  An undergraduate research team at the University of California, Santa Barbara explores one way that a children’s book can be digitized: blogging.  The project does not make any conclusions about whether or not e-books or digitized books may be replaced with print books but rather explores the implications and possibilities of a digital source where children and adults can refer to for a more interactive learning experience.

Introduction

According to Cynthia Houston’s study “Digital Books for Digital Natives,” Digital Natives are defined as children born after 1980 who from birth have experienced the digital world as a natural part of their daily lives and regularly access rich resources in digital format for information and entertainment.  These digital formats may come in forms of e-books, blogs, online resources, and more.  Even more, with tablet computers and smart phones now equipped with high-resolution color display, e-books seem to have greater flexibility and accessibility than paper-based texts.  Yet, a study conducted by Huang et al. mentions that though many studies have investigated e-books by targeting undergraduate students, less attention has been paid to children (703).  From this speculation, “Letters From Felix: A Virtual World Tour” was brought to life.  The members in this project wanted to specifically target children’s books and examine how the impact of technology has affected children development and their educational experience.

The title of the project originates from Laura Lindgren’s children book titled Letters From Felix.  Originally published in print, the illustrated book takes the audience on a journey with Felix, a lost plush rabbit who ends up from an airport to six different major cities around the world: London, Paris, Egypt, New York, Kenya, and Rome.  Sophie, the little girl in the book who loses Felix in the airport is surprised and elated to find a letter from Felix when she comes back from school one day.  From there, Sophie and the audience are taken on a virtual excursion through all the six different cities that Felix visits.  One creative aspect in this children’s book is the hand-held letters that can be physically extracted from the book itself to more accurately replicate Sophie reading the letters from Felix.  Essentially, the audience of the book is able to play the role of “Sophie” and read Felix’s letters in their hands.  Please note, however, that Letters From Felix was used as a source of inspiration for this project and merely served as ground zero in finding a book that is easily accessible and reflective of other representative children’s books.

The purpose of the project is to digitize children’s literature, like Letters From Felix and Flat Stanley, and expand them, adding multimedia elements, and a fun, interactive style just the way the hand-held letters in the book proves to be, except digitized.  Often, digital resources are filled with a convergence of media types, allowing the audience to understand the multiple layers of meaning in a piece of literature.  The project aims to be highly connective, interactive, and nonlinear in its structure and aims to answer the questions: 1) how will digitizing literature affect the next generation of children and 2) what is gained and what is lost when a children’s story is converted into a multimedia, interactive webpage?  Ultimately, in designing this project, the “Olé’s Grand Adventure” project seeks to recreate these traditional picture books into a webpage for children, to expand their learning experience toward different cultures as well as increase their competency with different technologies and media. 

Aside from the team’s main goals of answering the two questions stated above, here are a few points of interest that also played a role in the decision-making process in designing the project the way in which team members did:

•    Traveling is a formidable experience, but not everyone has the opportunity to travel to the places that they want to, so a virtual world tour of the countries would be a good way to engage people in awareness of global issues and cultures. 
•    From a psychological viewpoint, the team thinks it is important to not forget the impact that children’s books have on the development of a child.  As children grow into adulthood, they forget about the influences from their childhood.  The team believes this digitization would give children and even adults the opportunity to engage in a work that is not taken seriously and see the importance of it. 

Background Research

As previously stated, Digital Natives are defined as children born after 1980 who from birth have experienced the digital world as a natural part of their daily lives and regularly access rich resources in digital format for information and entertainment (39).  In a world where humans do not evolve at the same rate that technology does, the Internet is familiar territory for Digital Natives.  They read materials on the Internet for school and for leisure, and they turn to the Internet for their information needs more often than traditional reference materials” (39).  According to Houston, the increasing digitization of information means that books and print media are no longer the sole source of reading materials available to Digital Natives.  To serve this ever-growing population of readers who expect personalized and relevant information to be instantly available whenever and wherever they need it, books in the digital format must be accessible online so they will continue to experience the rich treasure trove of contemporary and historical literary characters, themes, and genres that children and adults have cherish for generations” (39).  More importantly, children’s books in digital format are essential if children’s literature is going to remain a popular form of information and leisure reading for present and future Digital Natives.  As opposed to books, which children have learned to read from left to right and front to back, children approach digital materials nonsequentially, using hyperlinks to move from page to page or topic to topic.  Houston further confirms that the rendering of children’s literature in digital format provides opportunities for children to experience the characters, themes, and settings of beloved books in new and exciting ways. 

Additionally, in a study conducted by Huang et al. titled “Empowering Personalized Learning with an Interactive E-book Learning System for Elementary School Students”, concluded that using an e-book or printed book made no significant difference to student’s reading accuracy (703).  The tailor-made e-book learning system, however, achieved a better-personalized learning experience for elementary school students (Huang et al 704).  The study explains that since the young generation has grown up with new technology, they are likely to have different expectations and behaviors towards the use of digital media.  The multimedia-enriched visual appeal that has the potential to integrate various supportive materials for personalized learning creates greater accessibility than paper-based texts. 

The study points out that the present e-book industry is aimed primarily at how to digitize printed works rather than how to develop and use the new technology to support learning.  Many related works toward e-book reading, learning and design issues revealed that the current e-books might not take the advantages in supporting personalized learning, which is something that the project aims to achieve.  More and more researchers have examined how to integrate e-books into academic learning.  However, the results have shown that both teachers and students believe that current e-books are not readily used as printed books.  However, the design of an e-book may need to differ from that of a printed book to make for a more constructive user experience.  Users usually want to interact with resources and have functionality to which they have become accustomed in their e-book experiences. 

Olé’s Grand Adventure: An E-Adventure

For copyright infringement purposes, the team modified the project to refer to Letters to Felix as an inspiration point, not a point of reference.  In order to do this, the team chose a cat figure instead of a rabbit, and named the character Olé instead of Felix.  Working around Houston and Huang et al.’s research, the team members tailored the project to better understand the speculations of what is gained or lost when a children’s book is digitized not necessarily as an e-book, but as an online resource.  Team members also designed the blog/website in hopes that they would not just create an interactive experience, but also create a platform that supports learning.  Members of the team took into account that the design of an e-book may need to differ from that of a printed book in order to develop a more constructive and interactive user experience.  The project aimed to create a website, ideally with a home page consisting of a world map with flags at each location that Olé visits that contain hyperlinks to separate WordPress blogs that individually explore each country.  In order to achieve this idea, two online softwares were used to uphold the ingenuity of the project: MapBox and Wordpress.  MapBox was born to meet a need that other tools do not address.  MapBox offers three kinds of map products: MapBox Streets, an accurate worldwide map powered by up-to-the-minute data from the OpenStreetMap project; MapBox Terrain, an elevation and land-use layer for the entire world; and MapBox Satellite, which offers highly-detailed imagery of the whole planet.

In this project, Olé visits seven cities: Tokyo, New Dehli, Rome, New York, London, Dublin, and Lima.  A child or an adult with access to this MapBox homepage has eight links with pointers directly on the map to navigate more easily, and to get a sense of the locations of each city in retrospect.  This is something that is not portrayed in the printed book.  Although Lindgren’s Felix does relay which country he is presently at with each letter that he sends to Sophie, he does not geographically educate the children in the audience where the cities are in retrospect to the world.  Now, each city on the MapBox directly leads the child or adult to the corresponding blog in which there is an already set-up blog about the adventures that Olé encounters in that particular country.  Because team members wanted the blog’s appearance to resemble each country’s culture, different themes were used for each country.  This, in turn, also reflects the “letters” that fold out of the real book of Letters From Felix in that the different blog themes can resemble the unique design of every country.  Just as a postcard from one country will differ from a postcard from another country, the unique themes play a role in create clear and definable boundaries between the cities.  Take New York City, New York, for example, and compare it to Tokyo, Japan.  The child will notice that the theme of New York is more minimalist and the theme for Tokyo is more colorful to reflect the different colors of the cultural Japanese kimono.  Another example is Dublin, Ireland and Rome, Italy.  Dublin’s theme aims primarily to accent its most recognizable point of reference, which in this case is the mountain in the background.  In Rome’s case, however, since the food is universally prominent, it was important to make sure to attack that topic and educate the audience in that specific area.  Small details like this are not intended to be clear to the audience, but meant to play a very subtle role in engraining the information in a child’s memory.  This technique is meant to resemble a real trip to a country abroad.  Just as a trip abroad will not necessarily pin-point the exact cultural representations of the country one is presently at, the project’s website and blogs are meant to give an understated representation of the country’s unique cultures. 

Further, the project’s home map page includes a pointer at Olé’s home: UCSB.  This link will lead children to a printable passport in which the child will use to collect all the immigration stamps for each city they visit.  Therein, each city’s blog contains a link in its home page that also includes a printable stamp that the children can use to fasten to their tangible passport.  Again, this tool was designed by the team members and is aimed primarily to achieve the goal of an interactive experience. 

Evaluation and Conclusions

To better understand the organic efforts and intentions of the team, it will be best to lay out what the team members had imagined for this project initially, and what actually was accomplished.  In reality, this project is something of which is easily presentable to both adults and children, at least that is what the team had aimed for it to be.  However, the project itself does not seem to entirely come off this way as much as the members of the team intended it to.  The goal is to create an educational experience for both an adult and a child. 

Furthermore, the lack of computer programming skills of the team members was the biggest downfall in the project.  Each team member had an idea of what would benefit a child in this project, but many tasks could not be accomplished because the team 1) did not have access to professional computer graphic design aid, 2) did not have capital to take advantage of all the resources and gadgets on WordPress, and 3) did not have sufficient time to fully polish the digital work.  A stronger point in at least one of these could have benefitted the team, and taken the digitized work to a higher level in achieving academic learning success.  If time would have permitted, the project could have benefited from real-life users and survey-takers for feedback on how the digitized adventure could be improved, or how the digital work is of any benefit for education and personal learning.

The potential benefits with e-books should be further explored for developing e-books in academic learning.  The digital natives are already confronted with a high technological environment, and their acceptance of technology seems plausibly higher than the elderly, making it even easier for something like an e-book learning experience to be “accepted” and possibly integrated into education in schools from elementary to college.  The potential benefits with e-books should be further explored for developing e-books in academic learning.  To this end, various personal assisted techniques should be developed in order to provide a clear understanding of individual learning process in contrast with the summative results by most prior studies conducted in a printed text learning context. 

Works Cited

Houston, Cynthia. "Digital Books for Digital Natives." Children & Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children. 9.3 (2011): 39-42. Academic Search Complete. Web. 4 Nov. 2013.

Huang, Yeuh-Min, Tsung-Ho Liang, Yen-Ning Su, and Nian-Shing Chen. "Empowering Personalized Learning with an Interactive E-book Learning System for Elementary School Students." Education Technology Research & Development 60.4 (2012): 703-22. Academic Search Complete. Web. 4 Nov. 2013.