Electronic literacy today is a moving target.How and why we read and write online are evolving at the fast pace of Internet time.One of the most striking developments in the past few years has been how new social networking phenomena on the Web like community tagging, shared bookmarking, and blogs have created convergences between consumers and creators, between reading and writing, between public and private spaces.Blogs invite us to write responses to items we have read, to move from observer to participant.Shared tagging invites us to analyze texts and sum up their distinctiveness in keywords.Writing online may involve coding or scripting, as we try to add distinctiveness in formatting or interactive functionality to our texts, blurring the lines between writing and programming.Web browsing and reading must be supplemented by abilities in sorting, navigation, and critical thinking.Integration of other media into texts complicates further the notion of literacy.We will examine in this column some of the ways in which these developments are reflected in new tools, services, and approaches to finding, creating, and transforming texts on the Web, and what this might mean for language learning. Discovery: Tagging and the Semantic WebOne of the challenges we face in using the Web, whether as language learners or instructors, is in finding the resources appropriate to our needs.We know there is a wealth of information and opportunity on the Web, authentic texts in all languages, on-line communities of learners and practitioners, wonderfully inviting Web sites spotlighting cultural practices, vibrant exchanges of views on all subjects under the sun, and all manner of opportunities for reading and writing -if only we could find them.New methods of finding and identifying Web resources involve fundamental skills of analysis, contextualization, and conceptualization, not to mention reading and writing themselves.You can't "tag" a Web resource without being able to extract salient points the author makes, considering how to summarize in keywords what's important, and placing that text in the context of others.Of course, the traditional and most-widely used means of finding texts, or other Web resources, is to perform a search, most often using Google.With the vastness of the Web today (one report indicates Google indexes over 8 billion Web pages) and the proliferation of junk, googling can be a hit or miss proposition.An alternative to searching is browsing by classification, as in the original Yahoo model.This is an area in which librarians and professional organizations have contributed mightily by evaluating, collecting and annotating categories of texts and resources.A site/service such as Merlot offers expertbased reviewing and ranking of Web sites, including excellent collections of language learning sites.Communities of practice such as Webheads also contribute.On the other hand, many sites that purport to be site collectors are simply commercial endeavors or just place-holders for advertising.As such sites proliferate, students more than ever need skills in critical thinking to be able to sift and evaluate.One of the proposed solutions to the chaos of the Web, going back to a suggestion from Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, is the implementation of what has been called the Semantic Web, a system in which meaningful information about Web texts can be extracted automatically from Web pages and collected by intelligent "agents".Agents are computer programs launched from a server which function autonomously over a period of time, similar to the crawling programs used by search engines to discover and catalog Web pages.By adding meaning to information, the Semantic Web holds the promise of powerful opportunities for creating educational content through combining resources from many sources, using human or machine means, to build a variety of customized learning resources.
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Robert Godwin‐Jones (2006) studied this question.