The comic panel above is from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. It illustrates quite well the difficulty humans have in accepting and integrating new media forms into our thinking. The more tools people have to express ideas and share knowledge the better off we are as a community. I am not one of those who think that paper and pen are the end all and be all of human expression. However, I feel that as a culture we are still trying to catch the tail of the tiger as it rushes forward constantly morphing into new incarnations of itself. The Internet 2.0 is a good example. My parents still use dial up to access the internet and most of the "new" internet is not only unavailable, but makes navigating the web a pain. The technological revolution has taken place in such a very uneven way. Until everyone has broadband connection with the speediest processors, HD monitors and newest operating systems we are going to continue to have trouble communicating to each other on an equal footing. The computer I am using right now is running Windows XP while the computer in my living room runs Vista and my wife's laptop has the newest Windows 7 operating system. I can't even create a consistent digital environment within my own home. How am I going to hope to create a universal baseline of technological literacy within my classroom?

Until Moore's law is broken and computing power and equipment settles into a stable foundational standard people will continue to struggle to keep up with the changes and fail to use these tools to their full potential. Teachers and students seem to spend so much time fidgeting with and learning how to use gadgets that we loose focus on the essential knowledge and evaluative skills we wanted to express in the first place.

In the breakaway reading a definition for literacy was suggested as: "ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts" (UNESCO, 2004^). This is fine working definition but so often when it comes to digital media learning to use the tool is seen as a higher priority than the content itself. We have a very limited amount of time to capture the attention, imagination and abilities of students so that they might progress academically. I dislike the idea of being so distracted from the concept of literacy by the tools we have chosen to use to help teach literacy.

I enjoy technology. I grew up with it (my first computer was a Commodore 64, my first game system was pong) The communications revolution of the past generation has been an important step forward in our social evolution. But I struggle with my own assumptions about the extent this technology is available and used within the community. A few hours in the computer lab is not going to balance the scales of digital literacy for the student who doesn't have access to a computer in their home. However, organizational skills, essential knowledge about the world and skills that facilitate problem solving can allow for a poor student to balance the scales of experience on their own. This can be done without the use of computer technology at all. When digital technology stops being an augmentation to our learning process and begins to be an encumbrance is when we need to step back and reevaluate our position on how we are going to proceed as an education system.