Leanne Bowler

Designing Web portals in intergenerational teams: Two prototype portals for elementary school students

This article describes and discusses the detailed procedures followed by two intergenerational teams comprising the researchers and a group of eight grade-six elementary students (ages 11 to 12 years) and a group of six third-grade elementary students (ages 8 to 9 years), respectively, in designing two prototype Web portals intended for use by elementary school students. These procedures were based on three design theories: Contextual Inquiry, Participatory Design, and Cooperative Inquiry. The article also presents and describes the two resulting Web portal prototypes and discusses the design criteria employed by the teams. Conclusions are elaborated on the basis of this research experience regarding how such a design process should be conducted in the context of an intergenerational team, and what characteristics young users expect to find in Web portals that they will use to support their informational needs in terms of elementary school projects and assignments.

Primary School Students, Information Literacy and the Web

A generation ago, before such themes as active learning, inquiry-based learning, authentic learning and meaningful learning were part of the vocabulary of educators, school projects that required independent research would have involved finding an article in an encyclopedia, and faithfully copying the text word for word. This level of information literacy was sufficient in a classroom where the expected learning outcome was to find the correct answer to a specific question and know the facts. What information literacy skills do students need in the early twenty-first century? Are the learning objectives in the classroom reflected in the information literacy skills exhibited by students? Do the learning experiences in the classroom facilitate the acquisition of these skills or, have the learning experiences simply been repackaged in the new technologies, giving the impression of being up-to-date, while they remain qualitatively the same as learning experiences from thirty years ago? To answer these questions, this study looks at how grade-six students (11 to 12 years of age) completed a class project using the World Wide Web as their primary resource. The goal of this study is twofold. First, it aims to describe how students accessed, interacted with, and used content on the Web in order to discover patterns in their use of the Web. Secondly, it is hoped that it will present new questions for teachers about the use of the Web as an instrument for learning.

Children as Designers of Web Portals

This paper describes and discusses the process undertaken by a design team comprising both elementary school students and researchers to design a web portal intended for use by children. The team of eight grade-six students and three researchers met twice per week over 12 sessions to design a low-tech prototype. The approach adopted by the team was based upon several design theories related to usability studies: contextual inquiry, participatory design and cooperative inquiry. The advantages of such an inter-generational approach to portal design are presented as well as some of its problems.

Eating disorder questions in Yahoo! Answers: Information, conversation, or reflection?

This study investigated a particular form of social Q&A – Yahoo! Answers – and the nature of the questions posed by teens on the topic of eating disorders. The goals of this study were to identify the information needs of questioners in Yahoo! Answers vis a vis the topic of eating disorders, to create a taxonomy of question types in Yahoo! Answers on the topic of eating disorders, and finally, to contribute to broader models of question-asking in social Q&A. We achieved these goals through a content analysis of 2230 questions posed in Yahoo! Answers between December 2005 and April 2011. This resulted in a classification scheme with five overarching themes - Seeking Information, Seeking Emotional Support, Seeking Communication, Seeking Self-Expression, and Seeking Help to Complete a Task, and the sub-categories of factual, diagnosis, treatment or intervention, validation, seeking comfort, conversation starters, deep talk, confession, reflection, homework help, and manuscript ideas. Through the investigation of the socio-emotional aspects of social Q&A, this study enriches our understanding of the affective dimension of health information behavior.

Towards an Alternative Information Retrieval System for Children

A recent survey of more than 1700 households indicates that the main reason many parents purchase computers and connect their children to the Internet at home is for education (Safe and Smart). In addition the survey shows that children also use the Internet for educational activities that go beyond required school work. In fact, the fastest growing group of Internet users are children between the ages of eight and twelve (Vise, 2003), who are increasingly using the Web to access educational as well as entertainment materials. Children, however, rely on conventional information retrieval (IR) systems and search engines intended for general adult use, such as MSN or Google, and to a much lesser extent, Web portals such as Yahooligans! and LycosZone specifically intended for young users (Large et al., 2004; Large, Beheshti, and Rahman, 2002a). But research has shown that children’s information needs (Walter, 1994), research approaches (Kuhlthau, 1991), and cognitive abilities and higher order thinking skills (Neuman, 1995; Siegler, 1998; Vandergrift, 1989) differ from those of adults. The results of earlier studies on children’s use of online catalogues designed for adults indicate that young users are often faced with difficulties locating specific information related to their information needs (Hirsh, 1997). A growing body of research points to the problems children typically encounter when seeking information on the Web. Kafai and Bates (1997) conducted one of the first studies with young children on their use of Web sites, and concluded that they were able to navigate through the links and scroll. Only the older children, however, could use search engines effectively. Hirsh (1999) investigated the searching behavior of ten fifth graders and concluded that they encountered difficulties in formulating effective search queries and did not use advanced features. Schacter, Chung, and Dorr (1998) conducted a study on Internet searching by fifth and sixth graders and concluded that they did not plan their searches, used ill-defined queries, and preferred browsing. Large, Beheshti, and Moukdad (1999), investigating the information seeking behavior of 53 sixth graders, similarly found that children preferred browsing to searching. Bowler, Large, and Rejskind (2001), focusing on a few case studies of grade six students concluded that search engines designed for adults are unsuitable for children. Wallace et al. (2000), studying sixth graders, discovered that experience in using search engines does not improve children’s search strategies and in general information seeking is an unfamiliar activity for children.

I know what you are going through: answers to informational questions about eating disorders in Yahoo! Answers: a qualitative study

The purpose of this study is to enrich our understanding of social question and answer (Q&A) sites as a health information source for teens. To do so we investigated answers to 81 informational questions about eating disorders posted in Yahoo! Answers, a social Q&A site. Through a content analysis, we found that users do not always respond to eating disorder questions with credible, factual information, even if the need for it was expressed in the question. The findings suggest that people who pose questions in Yahoo! Answers use it as a social and emotional scaffold rather than an informational source, even if their questions are couched in terms that suggest they are seeking information. Further, a large portion of the people who answer such questions understand this to be the purpose and rarely provide answers drawn from evidence-based medicine or reliable, credible sources for health information. Through the investigation of the answers to questions on a health topic that is prevalent amongst teens, this study deepens our understanding of the health information behavior of young people and the quality of the health information they find in Yahoo! Answers.

Linguistic characteristics of eating disorder questions on Yahoo! Answers - content, style, and emotion

Social Q&A provides the possibility of looking into how people verbally express their information needs in natural language. In this study, we analyzed linguistic properties of different types of questions on the topic of eating disorders in Yahoo! Answers. Using term frequency analysis, Part-of-Speech (POS) analysis, and sentiment analysis, we examined linguistic content, linguistic style, and emotional expressions in two broad categories of eating disorder questions from Yahoo! Answers -- socio-emotional questions and informational questions. Overall, the results of this study show that the language used in these two categories of questions are substantially different, suggesting the different nature of the needs that underlie these questions. Socio-emotional questions take similar characteristics to personal narratives, focusing on past experiences and emotions. The heavy use of negative emotion words in this question type, along with other distinct linguistic characteristics, suggests that a key motivation of users asking this type of question is to work through their emotions related to the given health issue (eating disorders). On the other hand, informational questions show traits of relatively complex, precise, and objective writing, and reflect much varied interests with regard to the topic of eating disorders. All in all, this study demonstrates that the combination of simple text analytic techniques reveals much about the linguistic characteristics associated with different kinds of questions, and thereby shed lights on the nature of the needs underneath the questions.

Developing Design Interventions for Cyberbullying: A Narrative-Based Participatory Approach.

This paper presents a user-generated framework for designing affordances that would counter acts of cyberbullying on social media sites. To do so, we used narrative inquiry as a research methodology, which allowed our two focus groups – one composed of teens and the other of undergraduate students – to map out a cyberbullying story and overlay it with a set of design recommendations that, in their view, might alleviate mean and cruel behavior online. Four “cyberbullying stories” were constructed by the participants, each one revealing two sub-plots – the story that “is” (as perceived by these participants) and the story that “could be” (if certain design interventions were to be embedded in social media). In this paper, we describe seven emergent design themes evident in the participants’ design recommendations for social media: design for reflection, design for consequence, design for empathy, design for personal empowerment, design for fear, design for attention, and design for control and suppression.

Design techniques for revealing adolescent memory processes related to information seeking: a preliminary study

This study investigates the effectiveness of design techniques as a means for uncovering metamemory, an attribute of metacognition, and its role in information seeking. A focus group with four adolescents aged 13 and 14 used design techniques such as brainstorming and sketching, metaphorical design and fictional inquiry, to help express their thinking about their own memory processes during the information search process. Results showed that metaphorical design and fictional inquiry are both effective tools for revealing conceptual thinking about metamemory and information seeking. Coupling these techniques with brainstorming and sketching helped the teens to visualize and communicate their ideas. Results from this study will contribute to knowledge about adolescent thinking, metamemory, and information seeking behavior, broaden the range of methodological approaches used in the study of information seeking behavior, and will provide cognitive models for the design of information systems and tools that scaffold metacognition.

Who is referring teens to health information on the web?: hyperlinks between blogs and health web sites for teens

This study analyzes the hyperlinks leading to six teen health web sites from a specific form of social media -- blogs - in order to discover who is referring teens to reliable health information. This was done by gathering inlink data using Google Webmaster Tools and then classifying inlink sources by type of creator. The study found that the teen health web sites in this study had a weak level of referrals from health-related groups compared to other organizations such as schools, and public libraries. With regard to blogs, we saw that personal blogs out-numbered blogs in any other category. We saw little evidence of blogs -- either personal or official -- created by health care professionals, a group which might be expected to actively refer teens to reliable health information. The weak network of inlinks leading from reliable health care providers is a lost opportunity for health care professionals to reach young people. Due to the weak network of inlinks from reliable health information sources, teens may not be accessing accurate and reliable health information. This could have a potential cost in terms of health outcomes. The results of this study present a snap shot rather than all-inclusive view of the visibility of teen health web sites and offer a starting point for further investigation.