We are all familiar with the deficit model of literacy: Children rot their minds with television, they destroy their morals with video games, they gratuitously set themselves at risk on the Internet. All these nefarious activities interfere with their ability and their willingness to sit down with an improving book. Schools need to crack down on all the different ways their students waste their time. This account is something of a caricature, but variations of such attitudes

can be traced in many corners of the literate world, and they certainly flourish in many of the world’s newspapers. The deficit model of all the ways that old and new media interfere with the development of good literate citizens is not hard to find. Kathleen Tyner’s suggestion that we should instead think in terms of an

asset model is an answer to some of the deep pessimism of the deficit model. ‘An asset model for media teaching assumes that mass media and popular culture content can work as a benefit to literacy instead of as a social deficit’ (Tyner, 1998: 7). She does not develop this model in great depth, but the idea is a fruitful one for tackling the simplicities of the negative view. We have discussed elsewhere (Robinson and Mackey, 2003; Mackey,

2002; Robinson and Turnbull, 2005) the changing asset models of young children today with regard to a whole range of media. We have argued that even pre-school children are often confident users of all the technologies – including old technologies such as books – that they find in their homes. We know that they can draw on a wide range of assets to make sense of new situations, as shown by the case study of Vero´nica, a young Mexican child (Robinson and Turnbull, 2005), making connections across media and between situations to increase her understandings of the world and her ability to interpret new challenges. However, at the same time, there can be dangers inherent in too romantic a version of the asset model.