New media literacies in children’s online writing

The advent of digital media in the contemporary communication landscape has raised a generation of "native speakers" of the nascent digital culture (Prensky, 2001, p. 1). A plethora of names such as the digital natives (Prensky, 2001), the MillennialS (Wilber, 2010 ), the digital generation (Buckingham, 2006), Homo Interneticus (BBC, 2010) amongst many others have been 'used to characterise young people who use digital media as an integral part of their lives in a taken-for-granted manner. In this chapter, we adopt a practice view of how children engage with digital media for online writing and explore how educators can reconsider the use of digital media to foster authentic writing opportunities in order to better connect to the practices of writing in their daily lives. We argue that because literacy is a social practice and it is dynamic, the emergent practices of children's online writing have pedagogical implications on what and how practitioners should teach literacy. The parochial focus of this chapter is not about rethinking the notion of literacy to better meet national standards, although we acknowledge this is critical to educators; our purpose is to recognize the new media literacies acquired by children while they participate in online writing and discuss ways of closing the widening chasm between children's school and out-of-school literacy practices (Bulfin & North, 2007; Ladbook, 2008; Lankshear & Knobel, 2006).