Learning to use internet resources, digital photos and videos, and other 21st century media requires new reading skills--new literacies.  Many critical reading strategies that we use when reading print will translate online, but others will not.  Even while we use cross-over strategies, we need to develop new strategies for new problems.  Here are some issues to consider:

• How do you interpret digital photos in an age when Photoshop makes it possible to portray the world as the photographer wants it to appear, rather than the way it truly is?
• How can you tell if the information presented on a website is reliable and factually accurate or just a lot of misguided disinformation?
• How do you tell the difference between an unbiased journalistic article and a blog post that voices a journalist's personal opinion?
• Wikis, blogs, YouTube, and other Web 2.0 tools give everyone who wants one a voice.  But then how do you know who to listen to?  Who speaks with authority online?  How can you tell?
• The days are gone when opinions were relegated to the op-ed page of the newspaper.  In a HyperText online newspaper, everything is linked together seamlessly.  Is determining fact from opinion different (or more difficult) online than in print?

These are critical literacy skills for 21st century adults.  We need them as teachers, and our students need them as learners, as parents, as citizens.  How can we learn them for ourselves?  How can we help our students acquire them?

Here is an interesting website for teaching critical reading online.  Though it looks convincingly real, the entire site is nonsense, built by a university professor to teach students not to believe everything they find online.  Check out the "endangered tree octopus"!  http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

Wiki community members, please weigh in with your thougts on these issues!

If you're interested in these and similar issues, check out these links:

21st Century Literacies from Noodle Tools:  http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/literacies/

New Media Literacies project from MIT:  http://newmedialiteracies.org/

From Now On (an educational technology online journal) deals with these and other issues.  The journal is targeted at K-12 educators, but many of the problems and solutions can be translated to the adult education field.

On a related note, here is a short video lecture about issues of digital media, copyright, creativity, and youth.  I think it's a valuable lesson for all of us, but particularly those of us who work with young adults.