children

There is still a big gap between electronic literature for children and Portuguese schools. Actually, this situation is in contrast with the increasing interest the educational community and publishers show in print literature for children and young adults in Portugal.In this paper we aim to develop the steps that the team from the project Inanimate Alice: Translating Electronic Literature for an Educational Context (Centre of Portuguese Literature at the University of Coimbra) took in order to give Portuguese students the opportunity to experience e-lit.As our ultimate goal is to introduce e-lit in Portuguese schools, the team has translated the first five episodes of Inanimate Alice and is now working on the translation of the Pedagogical Guidance, created by Bill Boyd.To accomplish that, we needed to find financial support to publish the Portuguese version of the series. So we contacted the two biggest education-oriented Publishing Companies in Portugal, but they rely a lot on the ministerial documents and they barely dare to innovate, as it is safer to publish what the Ministry of Education (ME) recommends schools, teachers and students to buy.Yet documents such as the Profile for Students issued by the ME in 2017 expose the need to teach them how to read digital texts, but neither publishers nor ministerial documents do recognise the educational potential of hypertextual and multimodal literature.Being aware that educational changes in Portugal often happen from top to bottom, meaning that we need the approval from the ME to have some impact in classrooms, we contacted the National Reading Plan (PNL) whose Commission asked the universities for books suggestion. It took some months, but finally we were recommended to present Inanimate Alice in a teachers training context on an annual basis as part of the PNL 2017 strategic plan, prepared by the Ministry of Science, Technology of University Teaching.Meanwhile we contacted some public schools located in the Centre of Portugal in order to conduct, in February 2018, a study based on an experiment in which a large group of sixth and eighth graders interact with Inanimate Alice. With the aim of reducing the gap we mentioned previously, we prepared two questionnaires where we evaluate the students’ aesthetic perception, their attention and immersion, and the comprehension skills required by this kind of work. As to the teachers, we are interested to know what they think about the interest of Inanimate Alice experiment, how it enhances the students’ knowledge, what inherent difficulties it implicates and what activities they would like to suggest.

The market, the academia, parents and even pediatricians have witnessed the growing avalanche of digital products aimed at appeasing adults’ anxieties regarding the education of future generations, of children who have already fallen prey to the fascination of the screens. Among this offer overdose, it is difficult to elucidate which products are actually fulfilling their promises and which are dull, ineffective or even aggravating the evils they are supposedly counteracting. This presentation will address some of the concerns regarding the future of reading education by focusing on the study of two bilingual works: an enriched digitized edition of an old children story and a piece of interactive fiction. Each textual modality requires different strategies to produce engaging forms of interactivity, though in both cases the pedagogical intention is the same: to promote the pleasure of reading. In the first case, we have chosen to refresh “Una ciudad de libros” (“A City of Books”), a forgotten text from the Spanish Silver Age Period published in 1923 inside the collection Plaga de dragones. This period, famous for the effervescence of its cultural life, saw the emergence of Saturnino Calleja Publishing House, or as it has been described today, the Zara of Books. Creating an enriched digital version of this text has allowed us to make relevant discoveries about this collection from a philological perspective. At the same time, we hope to have provided teachers, parents and children alike with an attractive new edition of the work which can help children today enjoy the same stories that their grandparents read nearly a hundred years ago, using digital edition to bridge a cultural as well as temporal gap between children from different times and places. (“Una ciudad de libros”/ “A City of Books” from the collection Calleja Interactivo/Interactive Calleja (prototype version)) The other selected work is an original piece of interactive fiction written by the Marino family entitled “El Cambiazo”/ “Switcheroo” from the collection of stories Mrs. Wobbles & the Tangerine House. This work, which progressively places young readers in front of nontrivial and difficult moral choices, allows us to study reader’s interaction from new angles given the potentialities of its infrastructure, the Undum platform, a free and open-source, JavaScript-based interactive storytelling platform developed by Ian Millington. Last year in Porto, the panel dedicated to children e-lit debated over the different types of interactivity found in e-lit works, establishing a gradation with respect to their ability to increase the reader’s appreciation and understanding of the story. This paper attempts to further this discussion by presenting some reading experiences carried out at several schools in Madrid and LA of these two types of interactive stories for children from 9 to 11 years old. These experiences will be used to test the design of the experiment, which could be hopefully carried out more extensively after opening it to criticism and discussion at the ELO venue.

Alan Bigelow tells in this interview how he started publishing online works of digital poetry around the year 1999 and where his inspirations for his work come from. Furthermore he explains why he chose to change from working with Flash to working with HTML5 and in which way this decision subsequently changed his way of writing. Then he considers the transition from printed books to digital literature from the point of view of the reader also in regards of the aesthetics of digital born literature. In the end he gives his opinion about the status of electronic literature in the academic field.

"Interactive fiction" has been used to describe many of today's multimedia products. In reality, there is not a universal understanding of what interactive fiction is or what it should entail. The meaning of "interactive" is often interpreted in different ways. Many stories are considered to be interactive because they are placed on the computer. Meanwhile, such stories may lack most of the essential qualities for good literature. Interaction fiction should be upheld to the same standards as traditional texts. Following this belief, this research covers the underlying theories of interactive fiction, examples of misleading "interactive fiction" studies, and guidelines for design pulled from the fields of writing, children's literature and instructional technology. I have used these guidelines to develop a prototype of interactive fiction, which was be tested and revised in several cycles. First, I revised the prototype based upon reviews by several groups of experts from the areas of instructional technology and childhood education. The prototype was then pilot-tested by two participants from the target market. Based upon the pilot-test results, I revised the prototype. Finally, several participants read the prototype. In this final stage, I observed the participants and conducted interviews with open-ended questions. Using the prototype that was developed according to proposed standards, I was able to gain insight into the target market's perception of interaction fiction. All details of the design and development of the prototype are included in effort to provide guidelines for building future interactive fiction. Additionally, several themes emerged when participants from the target market were observed and interviewed. Among the most prominent were the themes of storybook characters and identifying with those characters. Children in this study were able to identity themselves as the protagonist, making the main character's decisions throughout the story. Further, participants added their own elaborations of the story. In the end, the evidence of this research showed that participants were able to go beyond reading the story. The submersion into to story can be rooted in several existing literacy theories, which are discussed. Lastly, this research provides suggestions for future research, development and implementation of interactive fiction.