CREATING EQUITY SPACES FOR DIGITALLY FLUENT KIDS

Digital tools provide youth with powerful ways to extend their worlds and to enhance their capabilities in interacting with them. In a review of recent literature on youths’ engagement of digital tools, Lyman (2004) suggests that there are three main opportunities in the general domain of digital tool use by youth – communication, imagination, and cultural production among digital kids. Dr. Lyman also identified a key barrier: the digital divide. The digital divide has been addressed from an educational policy, technology infrastructure, and access issue, rather than a focus on the learner and supporting learning through enacted imagination. Our core hypothesis is that every child will be creators, producers, and generators of imagination if provided with equitable access to digital media, human instructional resources, and technologies to develop digital fluency1. This paper focuses attention upon uncovering how emerging tools might provide all youth with new chances to express themselves and how youth can use print and media rich elements to create new ideas, new projects, and new kinds of activities with peers and siblings (see Cheskin 2002 report). We identify the major opportunities for supportin