From Twista to Twain? Tim Shanahan weighs in

UIC professor Timothy Shanahan doubts here in his blog that while it's important to pay attention to literacy trends in kids, like IMing, reading teachers should keep their eyes on the prize. He challenges those who would argue that teachers should be investing much validity in the forms of literacy that come easily to kids. He writes:

One basic flaw is the claim that the skills students use when playing video games are commensurate with those evident in reading. We don’t have good measures of cognitive equivalence across tasks, so there just isn’t convincing support for the idea that understanding the conflict in a video war is equal to understanding the conflicts in novel like, The Scarlet Letter.