The research suggests that kids who live online understand the process by which knowledge is produced and shared in an online environment, whereas those kids who come in within 10 minutes, they're trying to get the answer and get off. So they're not as critical of a corporate Web site, for example. That's just one example of some fundamental inequalities in access to social skills and culture competencies between the information-haves and have-nots.

Really this becomes the basis for the new hidden curriculum. We now must say those kids who are raised in an environment where they have regular access to the online worldï¿??have a different way of learning that prepares them for school--to do better in school and in life--than those kids who were being left out.

Arguing for the development of aesthetic literacy, Sykes states, "What is at stake is not just another course in the curriculum but the recognition that the qualitative dimension of life, the sense of who we are as human beings, has a place in general education."

According to SETDA and CIC, media literacy means knowing how to access, understand, analyze, evaluate, and create media messages on television, the internet, and other outlets. It also means "knowing how to use these and other technologies safely, productively, and ethically."