This article considers how media educators can respond to the new challenges and opportunities of the Internet, and of digital media more broadly. It begins by exploring the value and limitations of the notion of 'literacy' in this context. It argues that 'competence-based' definitions of literacy tend to neglect the social diversity of literacy practices, and to retain a narrow focus on 'information', and it suggests that a broader definition of literacy necessarily entails a more critical approach. It then moves on to consider the nature of digital literacy more specifically. It argues that definitions of digital literacy have tended to take a rather limited view of information, and of issues of reliability and bias, and it proposes a broader approach which recognises the social and ideological nature of all forms of mediated representation. Following from this, it then provides some concrete indications of ways in which media education approaches might be applied specifically to the analysis of the World Wide Web, using the established framework of 'key concepts' (representation, language, production, audience). Finally, it considers the potential of digital media production in the classroom as a means of promoting digital literacy. It distinguishes between the approach adopted by media educators and more instrumental or expressive approaches. It then considers the difficulties of such work in a context where a 'digital divide' in access to technology continues to exist, both within and between societies. It argues that the benefits of digital technology in this respect depend crucially on the pedagogic and social contexts in which such technology is used, for example, in the opportunities that are provided for collaborative production and for students sharing their work with a wider audience. The article concludes by arguing that digital literacy needs to be seen as part of a broader reconceptualisation of literacy, and of the use of technology in education.Over the past 20 years, there have been many attempts to extend the notion of literacy beyond its original application to the medium of writing. As long ago as 1986, one of the leading British researchers in the field, Margaret Meek Spencer, introduced the notion of 'emergent literacies' in describing young children's media-related play (Spencer, 1986), and the call for attention to 'new' or 'multiple' literacies has been made by many authors over subsequent years

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the potential of so-called 'creative' methods in media research, and in social research more broadly. While some of this work has employed quantitative techniques, much of the impetus has come from qualitative researchers seeking to move beyond what are seen as the limitations of talk-based methods such as interviews and focus groups. Such methods typically, although by no means exclusively, employ visual means of representation, such as drawings, photography and video. Asking people to 'create' media -to compose their own news stories, advertisements or television schedules, to take photographs, make (or edit) videotapes or build three-dimensional models -can, it is argued, reach the parts that other methods have failed to reach. Such methods are believed to overcome the rationalistic or logocentric tendencies of verbal approaches, and to enable the subjects of research to express their views more directly, and with less interference or contamination from the researcher. As such, they are frequently claimed to be 'empowering' for participants.This new emphasis has been seen to reflect a broader 'shift to the visual'although it is worth noting that such a shift has been repeatedly proclaimed across the past several decades (cf. Gattegno, 1969;Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996). The interest in visual methods is apparent across a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, psychology, anthropology and education; and it has been particularly apparent in research involving children and young people (e.g. Clark and Moss, 2001;Kaplan and Howes, 2004;Niesyto, 2000). In the past ten years, there have been numerous 'handbooks' offering introductory accounts of visual methodologies from various disciplinary perspectives (e.g.

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