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"Adolescents entering the adult world in the 21st century will read and write more than at any other time in human history. They will need advanced levels of literacy to perform their jobs, run their households, act as citizens, and conduct their personal lives."

Content is what we teach, but there is also the how, and this is where literacy instruction comes in.

Moving to a new pedagogy is not easy for many district administrators, however, as the Web as a writing space is still primarily an unknown, scary place to put students. But as research is showing, students are flocking to online networks in droves, and they are doing a great deal of writing there already, some of it creative and thoughtful and inspiring, but much of it outside the traditional expectations of “good writing” that classrooms require

That change is spelled out clearly by the National Council of Teachers of English, which last year published “new literacies” for readers and writers in the 21st century. Among those literacies are the ability to “build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally,” to “design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes,” and to “create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts.” Very little of that kind of work is possible to achieve without expanding the way we think about writing instruction in the context of online social tools.

“Using online writing tools will allow students to write whenever and wherever they feel inspired, and to be able to speak to an audience that is larger and more important to them than the traditional classroom,” Childers says. “There is a reason why we should constantly be looking for ways to incorporate more innovative writing opportunities into our curriculum.”

We can agree or disagree with Kevin, but the world keeps spinning. Screens are made and used in instructive and destructive ways. As an educator I need to learn to use screens as learning platforms so that I can model constructive informative behavior for the students I interact with. So here is how I came to write this post. I subscribe to Will Richardson's blog weblog-ed in my Google Reader. He shared a link to Kevin Kelly's blog Technium. As I read the blog post I used Diigo to underline and add sticky notes. I now have this annotation in my Diigo groups. I will Twitter this and add a link in the New Literacies Institute Ning at newlit.org. Kevin will sell a few more books, which I have hundreds of, and add more readers of his blog.

This article is very interesting because it made me think.And I thougt that I was right when I bought a computer for my 81st birthday.It has a wide screen,and I could enlarge the letters to be able to read it because my eyes are bad. I felt that I was not anymore excluded of the world.I had entered the 21st century. The last 12 or some years I spend writing a book by hand.Nobody would ever read a single word of the more than 400 pages.No editor would have accepted it.But is has been typed and now it is on the web.Everybody can read it,and sites of military history,dutch and french,published it or parts of it(I wrote it in french)because it is about the 1940-campaign. Thank you,dear author,you made me feel I was right.

Bring on the technology, we have plenty of idle brain space waiting to make use of it.