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hildren like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International reading Association.

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books. But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

n fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.

we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.

This morning, Bud The Teacher, posted a request for designs for a 21st Century version of the “I Read Banned Books” buttons that we are all so familiar with. In response to this request, I played around with an idea:

A schoolboy who announced his imminent suicide on Facebook was saved when a friend across the Atlantic in America read his threat and raised the alarm.The 16-year-old, from Oxford, sent a late-night message on the social networking website to a girl sitting 3,400 miles away at her computer in Maryland. The teenager had been speculating about taking his life and shortly before 11.30pm on Wednesday wrote: ‘I’m going away to do something I’ve been thinking about for a while then everyone will find out.’

For the home user, however, password safety requires more than on-the-fly thinking. Pacheco suggests a system built around a main word for all instances. The distinction is that the name of the site is added somewhere. For example, if the main word is "eggplant," the password might be "eggyyplant" Yahoo, "eggplantgg" for Google or "wleggplant" for Windows Live. He suggests listing the variations in an Excel spreadsheet.

Hackers rely on a lot of methods. Some, Rogers said, employ "shoulder surfing." That means what it sounds like -- looking over someone's shoulder as that person is typing in a password

The type of hardware being used can be a clue, said Rogers, a senior technical staffer in the CERT Program, a Web security research center in Carnegie-Mellon University's software engineering institute. It's easy to find a default password, typically in the user's manual on a manufacturer's Web site. If the user hasn't changed the default, that's an easy break-in.

Olivia Gardner, a teenager from Northern California, had been severely bullied in school. After reading of her ordeal in a local newspaper, we were shocked. Olivia had endured so much pain. Her book bag had been dragged through the mud, her schoolmates had created an "Olivia's Haters" page on the internet, and they would whisper "Die Olivia" to her in the halls. Olivia's story broke our hearts, especially when we learned that she was suicidal. We couldn't imagine such cruelty.

livia's story moved us, and a spark ignited between us - we both recognized that there was something that had to be done about this situation. We knew we couldn't be bystanders. We organized a letter-writing campaign and asked our friends to write letters of encouragement to Olivia. These messages of healing and hope were the least we could send to Olivia to let her know that she was not alone and that we were thinking about her and hoping she would get better.

Heartfelt, honest and powerful letters started pouring in. And then came the media requests. The more attention the "Olivia's Letters" project got, the more letters we received. Suddenly, we were thrust into the world of bullying, as we read the letters sent to Olivia by former bullies and targets of these bullies. We learned of the remorse adults felt having been bullies themselves in their teen years, and of the depression the targets of bullies still experience years after they have been bullied. Thousands of letters from all over the country and even the world flooded into Olivia's mailbox, each offering a unique perspective on courage and compassion.