The information superhighway has far-reaching implications for teaching and learning. As today's youth show an overwhelming interest in electronic media, educators need to encourage students to develop new literacy skills.

Dr Ilana Snyder, like most academics, was making use of the information super- highway long before Bill Gates made it a household word.

But more recently the literacy educator and researcher at Monash University has grown tired of the so-called electronic revolution.

Her concerns, however, are not about the power or potential promised by new technologies such as the World Wide Web, home pages and hypertext.

What bothers Dr Snyder, an international expert in the emerging field of electronic literacy, is that after more than a decade, the debate hasn't kept pace with the rapid growth and uptake of the electronic technologies, especially among youth.

"At one extreme are the enthusiasts who claim the electronic era is transforming society and education systems, creating better communications and breaking down the barriers between traditional academic disciplines," she says.

"And at the other are those who demonise the technology -- claiming that hypertext is producing an alienated youth culture, is responsible for an alleged decline in literacy standards and that it spells the death of the printed book."

Dr Snyder refuses to take sides. "Whether we like it or not, we now live in a technoculture," she says. " It's futile to deplore the influence of these electronic technologies in our everyday and professional lives."

What is more significant, she says, is the need to bring schools and teachers up to speed with the overwhelming demand for and interest in the new electronic media shown by today's youth.

In particular, she says schools need to understand the implications for teaching and learning, especially in developing new literacy skills for students who are increasingly connecting to the new on-line media for a wide range of reasons, including its immediacy, newness and visual appeal.

According to Dr Snyder, the problem is that the people who are most important to the future of these new literacies -- school teachers -- have largely shied away from them, poss-ibly out of fear that their own roles, as well as that of the printed book, are under threat.

She is quick to dismiss suggestions that teachers will become redundant in the transition to the electronic classroom.

"A fundamental task of literacy educators is to equip students with critical evaluation skills," she says. "So it makes sense that they should play an invaluable role in teaching students how to use the new media intelligently and responsibly.

"In the highly commercialised and largely uncontrollable on-line world, for instance, most hypertext links (a technology which provides for the linking of graphics, chunks of text and sound which only exists on-line) aren't value-neutral." All links, she says, have been put there by someone else and often, in the case of the large corporations, for particular commercial purposes.

Redefining reading

Students and the wider youth community, as the predominant users of the WWW, should be prepared to critically navigate through the vast web of information with informed scepticism, Dr Snyder says. "Adopting a more critical approach will ensure that young people use the medium more effectively, rather than be used by it."

She says that once teachers understand the technology and its mass appeal among students, they will be better positioned to respond creatively and innovatively with new teaching and learning programs.

In the meantime, Dr Snyder says, the biggest challenge is for schools and the wider community to accept that the new technologies, particularly hypertext, are not alternatives to printed texts, but something quite different and independently valid.

"Unlike traditional text, which readers read in a linear way on the page, hypertext viewers can choose their own pathway through a web of texts," she explains. "Readers move from one chunk of information to another, rapidly and not in any particular sequence."

And this means, she says, that hypertext is redefining the traditional distinction between the writer/author and the reader.

"Hypertext gives readers or viewers the power, which was once the prerogative of the author, to make their own connections, create their own stories, include their own links and produce their own meanings."

She says that it is also becoming clear that the further we begin to explore the potential and possibilities of hypertext, the more we open up a virtual Pandora's Box of questions.

For instance, she asks, "If the hypertext reader is working equally as hard as the writer, then who owns the work? But that's another story."