There is a profound change taking place in media literacy.

Rather than being riven by angst over the future of immersive narratives, younger people are delightedly swimming in a sea of diverse choices.

Whenever they have access to tools, they are having a wonderful time using them. This summer an older relative questioned whether children were able to focus for long on any one topic, and if concentration was faltering because of the internet; all I could think about was the coordination and effort that went into four kids producing videos on a tablet computer. How they are creating may be different – out of this world for us oldsters – but as they say, the kids are alright. The question of whether we will have packaged, downloadable narratives or interlinked web-based structures is so much sturm und drangthat will be answered for us. Our children are telling themselves stories with the tools we are leaving behind for them.

This summer, my child along with three others received a mini-course on U.S. history. In each week’s session, they were tasked with telling a story about what they learned: the discovery of America by Europeans on one hand, and the Bill of Rights on the other. Instead of co-authoring written stories or individual essays, they collaborated to produce two short videos using an iPad and Apple’s iMovie. This was amazing to me: with minimal guidance from a Gen Y teacher, within a single week these young kids taught themselves to produce and edit a short video on a complex topic with a storyline, sound effects, and music samples on a device that didn’t exist a few years ago. For them, choosing video over writing a story “just made sense” – they could not even imagine an alternative. If someone would have suggested this was possible when I was as young, I would have thought they had dropped acid.

http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/PWxyz/2012/08/23/the-kids-are-alright-making-new-stories/