Conference Agenda (All times are shown in Mountain Daylight Time (MDT) unless otherwise noted)

Parents’ concerns about children’s digital media use were investigated using data from semi-structured interviews with 17 parents of children ages five to 11 at three branches of a U.S. urban public library system. Data were analyzed using collaborative inductive thematic analysis and approached with the concept of culturally-constructed anxieties about new media as an analyzing lens. The most common concerns included worries about exposure to inappropriate content, worries about digital media taking up time that children would otherwise spend engaging in more meaningful activities, concerns about safety and privacy, and worries about negative effects on children’s behaviors, attitudes, and social skills. Further analysis showed parents' deeper concern for children’s healthy development to underlie these narrower concerns. The authors conclude with the recommendation to shift the framing of discourse around parenting with digital media from risk protection to digital media education. Such a shift could raise awareness that framing children and digital media only in terms of risks is overly simplistic, and it could help parents come to understand that children’s digital media use is not just risky but also an opportunity for children to derive educational and social benefits, and learn how to operate in a digital media-dominated information ecosystem.

Virtual storytime programs supported young children and families when in-person library services were discontinued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. These virtual storytimes offered via videoconferencing systems allowed for the inclusion of some in-person storytime elements such as the librarian read-aloud, and children are the target audience of these picturebook read-alouds. Children’s nonverbal behavior symbolizes a powerful clue as to when they are engaged with the read-aloud story. What is unclear is how a child nonverbally engages with the storytime readings. This study shows how human pose detection software, OpenPose, was instrumented with custom Python scripts to track and code a preschooler’s nonverbal behavior during a virtual storytime read-aloud. Results demonstrate considerable nonverbal attentiveness and engagement by this child during the read-aloud.

Accessibility education has been rarely incorporated into the high school curricula. This is a missed opportunity to equip next-generation software designers and decision-makers with knowledge, awareness, and empathy regarding accessibility and disabilities. We taught accessibility to students (N=93) in a midwestern high school through empathy-driven games and interviewed three Computer Science high school teachers and one librarian who taught programming. Accessibility education is currently insufficient in high school, facing challenges such as teachers' knowledge and conflicted curriculum goals. The students exhibited increased knowledge and awareness of accessibility and empathy for people with disabilities after playing the games. With this education outreach, we aim to provide insights into teaching next-generation software designers about accessibility by leveraging games.

The Cognitive Map Mechanism explains that different textual representations influence cognitive effects by affecting how readers mentally organize and navigate information. The application of this mechanism in digital reading remains underexplored. We conducted a lab experiment(N=148) manipulating low/medium/high textual representation through non-/micro-/combined-annotation modes. Our aim was to clarify how the cognitive map based digital reading variations impact reading comprehension, performance calibration, and reading speed. Sufficient results showed that high-level textual representation provides superior cognitive effects in all dimensions. It is interesting to discover that medium-level textual representation impaired cognitive effects compared to low-level representation. Specifically, metacognition negatively moderated the influence of textual representation level on reading speed, suggesting that texts with both micro-annotations and graphic organizers can provide comprehensive cues and visual correlations to build cognitive map, thereby enhancing cognitive effects. Our study contributes novel insights for future research and practical implementation of cognitive-oriented strategies in digital context.