Literacy skills have always been important. In centuries past, people communicated via letters. These letters soon turned into telegraph messages. From there we advanced to the telephone, internet and then text messaging via a phone. Today's options for communication far outweigh the one or two of generations pasts. "Children learn these skills as part of their lives, like language, which they learn without realizing they are learning it." (N. Andersen, New Media and New Media Literacy: The Horizon Has Become the Landscape—New Media Are Here,; report produced by Cable in the Classroom, 2002, pp. 30–35) Students today learn in ways that their teachers could not even imagine decades ago when they were in school. Students learn technology just like they do the spoken language, by doing and today it is not uncommon for a 3 year old to have some basic knowledge regarding how to get on to the computer and load a game (hopefully educational). The way students learn and their abilities to showcase their learning has surpassed the years of book reports, posters, and shoe box representations. "We will not be able to achieve a liberating, collective intelligence until we can achieve a collective digital literacy, and we have now, more than ever, perhaps, the opportunity and the technologies to assist us in the human project of shaping, creating, authoring and developing ourselves as the formers of our own culture. To this end, we must create the conditions for people to become wise in their own way." (Poore, M. (2011). Digital Literacy: Human Flourishing and Collective Intelligence in a Knowledge Society. Australian Jouranal of Language and Literacy, 19 (2),20-26.)
