mith went on to describe different periods of reading instruction and how each was shaped by the most powerful social forces of its time.

instruction

Information-age organizations seeking to achieve greater productivity are organized horizontally, with teams within lower levels of the organization empowered to make important decisions related to their functioning.

Especially salient is the federal response from those nations, like Australia and the United States, with a long tradition of local control and little previous history of federal intervention. Even these countries are beginning to develop important national initiatives to raise literacy levels and prepare children in the use of ICTs.

a literacy curriculum during an age of information needs to include new, critical literacies that enable children to adequately evaluate messages from individuals and corporations that shape the information they provide

ne might view reading, writing, and communication on the Internet as including a set of multiliteracies, emerging as individuals from different cultural contexts encounter one another within different communication technologies.

New skills and strategies are required in this context to successfully comprehend information such as how to search for appropriate information; how to comprehend search engine results; how to make correct inferences about information that will be found at any hyperlink; how to determine the extent to which authors "shape" information presented on a webpage; how to coordinate and synthesize vast amounts of information, presented in multiple media formats, from a nearly unlimited set of sources; and how to know which informational elements require attention and which ones may be ignored.

ew literacies, such as these, almost always build on foundational literacies rather than replace them.

There are three sources for the deictic nature of literacy: (1) transformations of literacy because of technological change, (2) envisionments of new literacy potentials within new technologies, and (3) the use of increasingly efficient technologies of communication that rapidly spread new literacies. Each source contributes to the fundamental changes taking place in the nature of literacy.

e new literacies of the Internet will be defined in important ways around the rate at which one can read, write, and communicate.