Toddlers, Touchscreens, and Tablet Technologies: Learning “Concepts Beyond Print”

Abstract

From infancy, young children are immersed in a world of screens where the dominant modes for making meaning are sound, image, and animation rather than just print (Jewitt & Kress, 2003). And with the rise of touchscreens, touch has gained prominence in reading (Simpson, Walsh, & Rowsell, 2013), making mobile technologies uniquely suited for the youngest literacy users (Shuler, 2009). Educational researchers have known for quite some time that very youngchildren rely on touch and handling as a way to know the world. As babies handle and mouth objects, they learn about the textures, contours, and properties of things in the physical environment (Rochat & Senders, 1991). In literacy, children enrich their understandings of story through opportunities to play and handle materials in interactive board books that invite touch such as the classic Pat the Bunny (Kunhardt, 1940). “Children who are given the opportunity to manipulate objects and experience their textures can often demonstrate implicit knowledge which they may not be able to yet verbalise” (Kucirkova, 2014). Multimodal research on haptic modes and design (Rowsell, 2013) opens new ways to consider how touch operates in interactive cardboard books as well as on digital touchscreens. By stroking furry, scratchy, or smooth textures in baby board books, children coordinate gaze, touch, and speech to associate feels and language with various textures, that is, they are learning about touch and to discriminate the feel of various physical objects. By contrast, when tapping on touchscreens, the feel (or haptic experience) of the screen never changes: The touch is hard, smooth, glossy. Instead, touch monitors user actions to regulate the pressure used-e.g., to determine thickness of a brush stroke in paint programs (Rowe, Miller, & Pacheco, 2014; Matthews & Seow, 2007) or to adjust the speed and duration or abruptness of contact that discriminates between a drag and a swipe or an exploratory hover and a confirming tap (Neumann & Neumann, 2013; Simpson, Walsh, & Rowsell, 2013). Through touches and taps on glass screens, children are learning new readingpractices with the digital devices in their homes. As toddlers handle tablets, they learn that finger taps, pinches, and stretches on touchscreens activate icons thatsymbolize literate actions (e.g., opening or turning pages). This early literacy learning is evident in a viral YouTube video with about 4.5 million hits. In the opening scene of the parent-produced film A Magazine is an iPad That Does Not Work, a toddler uses her fingers to press, tap, and swipe icons on the glass screen on an iPad to open various apps (UserExperience Networks, 2011). But in the next scene, when she tries using the same finger on glossy fashion magazine pages, nothing happens. Puzzled, she pauses to test her finger by pressing it on her own knee. Satisfied that her finger still works, she returns to pressing spots on the magazine but with no reaction from the inert images on the page. In the final scene, she returns to the iPad and happily presses app icons that respond instantly to her finger touches. Here we see a toddler’s emerging understanding that reading operates differ-ently with noninteractive paper texts than it does on an electronic tablet. She experiences a rupture in her expectations for reading as she tries to engage a magazine that does not “do” anything. Her expectation is that reading is interactive, apparently based on prior experiences with similarly glossy but digital pages. In her concept of text, one engages in reading or “browsing” by pressing images with an index finger and waiting for perhaps a second for the tablet to respond. On a touchscreen display, pressing an icon or swiping across the screen launches an app or loads a new page, whereas pinching and spreading a thumb and forefinger resizes an image on a page. These mediated actions make up key digital reading practices, which, as this toddler discovered, simply do not work with static print on a magazine page.