ABSTRACT
Increasing access to digital technologies in many parts of the world has changed the conditions of possibility for literacy events resulting in the development of new diverse literacy practices (Janks & Vasquez, 2011). Nowadays readers of all ages can download books, music, and images, and Web 2.0 has given young people a global audience for anything they choose to upload. As such there are new spaces in which they can produce and re-produce identities and enter global online communities. The current generation of students are out-of-school creatives, driving how expressive technologies are used and circulated and, as a result, how schools will respond, adopt, and adapt new literacies practices (Vasquez, Harste, & Albers, 2010). Gee (2003) maintains that children today are learning more about literacy outside school than they are in school. For students, YouTube, cell phones with still, video, and audio capabilities, and other digital devices are not new; they are the everyday tools used to communicate in and navigate their worlds (Albers, Vasquez, & Harste, 2008). As such,
the possibilities presented by the new communication landscape, new modes of meaning making, the ongoing transformation of digital texts, the interactivity and immediacy of access — for some — to the information highway, continue to provide challenges to language and literacy teachers and researchers at all levels of education.
( Janks & Vasquez, 2011, p. 1)