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What is most valuable is that my literacy has expanded my communities. Instead of learning only from literacy leaders and the few authors I've been fortunate enough to hear at an annual conference or two, I can now learn from so many different people on a daily basis by accessing the internet. The thinking that is possible when I interact in new communities has been key to who I have become as a reader, writer and thinker. I love the way that I can become part of a community that I did not even know existed only a few years ago.

I love books and children's literature, and these will always be the anchors of my own work. But I can't be comfortable being a literacy teacher today without expanding my notion of what it means to be literate in the 21st Century.

White Paper - Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project (pdf)

Two page summary (pdf)

Social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. They have so permeated young lives that it is hard to believe that less than a decade ago these technologies barely existed. Today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity as did their predecessors, but they are doing so amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression

Saba can only mean: we do not need stupid technologies in schools. But of course this begs the question: what constitutes a stupid technology? Probably - almost certainly - the Rube Goldberg assemblage of gadgets described above. Technology which causes more frustration than relief for the teacher. Technology which - like the school projectors of yore - takes three teachers and a technician to operate. Technology which distracts from learning and adds to student's time spent staring at the ceiling.