What is a Text?

I have said it before and I will say it again: Part of this course needs to be not only how do we use these technologies, but how do we teach kids to use them AND think critically about what they are doing? I just read an article in the March 2009 Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy called "Teaching and Reading the Millennial Generation Through Media Literacy". This article defines Media Literacy as "the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and effectiely communicate in a variety of forms including print and non-print text".

Non-Print text? This is surely a new idea for most of us. Yet this article uses movies, photos, videos and other visual media as examples of text. I think there is value in expanding our definition of "text". I think about my 13 year old son who spends, it seems to me, every available moment watching Youtube. He is an excellent reader and writer in the traditional sense, yet video is the text of his choice.

The main idea of this article is two-fold: 1) we can't assume that the "digital natives" actually know how to USE all this technology. Accordingly, we need to teach it directly. 2) we need to teach kids to think critically about all the information--visual and print--that the new technology puts at their fingertps. They need to learn to "negotiate meaning". Simply letting the kids use the technology cannot be the end goal.