Auf der internationalen Tagung Anfang März in Manchester, die sich der frühen Literalität im Spiegel der Digitalisierung widmete, hielt Nils F. Tolksdorf einen Vortrag mit dem Titel "Reconceptualising early childhood literacy facing child-robot interaction". Thema des Vortrags waren die Besonderheiten eines sozialen Roboters im Vergleich zu anderen digitalen Medien sowie die Potentiale und Herausforderungen, die eine gemeinsame Buchlesesituation zwischen einem sozialen Roboter und einem Kindergartenkind birgt.
Abstract: "Reconceptualising early childhood literacy facing child-robot interaction"
Nils F. Tolksdorf & Katharina J. Rohlfing, Paderborn University, Germany
Literacy practices are changing fundamentally in the course of digitalization and today’s children grow up in a world in which they increasingly encounter digital technologies earlier in their development and more frequently than years ago. Children can not only experience computers and tablets as devices on which e.g., educational apps are installed, but also social robots are increasingly being developed as artificially intelligent, digital tools that support and expand early childhood education offering new possibilities for engaging children in social interaction (cf. Goodman, 1986) and thus more effective literacy practices such as joint book reading (Mubin et al. 2013; Saerbeck et al., 2010). In comparison with other digital media, a social robot provides additional features that can enrich an interaction by using various social signals (e.g., eye-gaze, gestures or body posture) and are crucial to robust language learning (Konishi et al., 2014). With the benefits of an embodied social agent, researchers have begun to apply social robots in an interactive, dialogic shared storytelling style to explore potentials and limits of supporting emerging literacy skills (Grimminger & Rohlfing, 2017). Linking to this study, our main aim in this paper is to present a study design, according to which a social robot was applied in a language game within a shared book reading situation. We will report the observations that we made during the sessions conducted with 12 preschool children aged 4 to 5 years and discuss potentials, limits and ethical aspects of the use of social robots for lit- eracy activities but also take a closer look on the challenges in designing a children-oriented interaction.
