Several years ago, more than I wish to admit, our 4-year-old daughter, Caity, turned to me and asked a simple, but profound question. "Dad," she said, "is today tomorrow?" Intuitively, I knew there was something important behind this question, but, like many busy parents, I didn't take time to think about the special nature of her query before I answered.

"No," I said, trying my parental best to be helpful and clear up any confusion. "Today is today and tomorrow is tomorrow."

Thinking about this a bit later, my response troubled me. I was quite certain there was something more complicated behind Caity's question. Why did she ask it? What did it mean?

Thinking about Caity's question eventually led me to an understanding of deixis, a linguistic term used to capture the special qualities of words like today, tomorrow, and here whose meanings are dependent upon the time or space in which they are uttered (Fillmore, 1966, 1972, 1975). Tomorrow is a Sunday when I write this word, but when you read this article, tomorrow could mean any day of the week. Time references like now, today, tomorrow, yesterday, or last week are deictic in nature; their meaning is entirely dependent upon the temporal context in which they appear. Fillmore points out that many locational and personal terms are also deictic. Here is next to me, but my here is likely to be your there; I means me when I say it, but my I is your you, or a third person's him.

Discovering the changing meanings for deictic terms is an important linguistic challenge for young children who have come to believe that words have fixed meanings (Murphy, 1986). To many young children, "A word is a word is a word," to rephrase a famous quote by Gertrude Stein, since most words have meanings that do not change substantially in time or space. Young children do not understand that the meaning of a deictic word like tomorrow may change drastically depending upon when it was said. Tomorrow is not always tomorrow; sometimes it is also today.

When Caity asked, "Is today tomorrow?" she was sorting through the slippery, conditional meanings for deictic terms we use to express time. Caity was really asking, "Is today the tomorrow you told me about yesterday?" It was a wonderful question for a young child to ask as she attempted to figure out the changing meanings for these deictic terms. Clearly, it was a question I did not fully appreciate when she asked it.

I recalled this story last spring with a smile as I sat in the stands watching Caity's high school graduation ceremonies. My mind wandered across many stories about Caity, stories that taught me important lessons about life, literacy, and learning. I kept coming back to this one, though, thinking about its meaning to our lives today.

As I sat watching the ceremonies, it seemed to me that Caity's question might also help us to understand the cusp on which we currently find ourselves. Here we stand between traditional forms of literacy and new forms of literacy that are continually appearing. In our rapidly changing world, new information and communication technologies regularly redefine what it means to be literate. Literacy, it seems, is not literacy is not literacy. Instead, literacy has become a deictic term; its meaning is continually changing, dependent upon the technological context in which it occurs. What it means to be literate has become a moving target, one we can never completely define because information and communication technologies continually change. As the meaning of literacy changes, our role as literacy educators is also being fundamentally altered.

One of the most visible technologies changing the nature of literacy is the Internet, an extensive set of computers around the world connected to one another and capable of quickly exchanging vast amounts of information. One text on the Internet ultimately leads to millions and millions of other texts, many of which contain additional media resources such as video, audio, animation, and e-mail. Moreover, new forms of communication are continually being developed on the Internet that regularly require new forms of literacy learning in order to effectively exploit their potential. Internet relay chat sessions, MOOs (MUD, object oriented), MUDs (multiuser dungeon), videoconferencing, push technologies, and other communication forms not yet imagined are on their way to your classroom. The Internet is providing new technologies to classrooms and, as a result, redefining literacy, learning, and teaching for each of us.

If you have any doubt about the Internet entering your classroom and changing the nature of literacy, learning, and teaching, consider these observations:

• Each year, Linda Hubbard, a fifth-grade teacher at Carminati Elementary School in Tempe, Arizona, USA, engages her students in Internet activities during a science unit on exploring space. They "log in" as visitors to the current space shuttle in orbit, discover information about crew members, monitor the progress of science experiments, ask the astronauts questions, and study the tracking maps of the shuttle's orbits. They also travel through space to each of the nine planets in our solar system by taking The Nine Planets Tour, an exciting and informative multimedia experience for students.
• Over 200,000 children [more than a million as of this updating] have traveled to a computer in Australia to explore a wonderful series of adventures about Max, the Koala, and his friends. These stories have been written and illustrated by Alex, a 5-year-old boy, and his father, Scott. They are accompanied by delightful music and interactive animations. Alex, it appears, is quickly becoming the most widely read 5-year-old author in the world.
• Following California's lead, most states in the U.S. have set aside "Net days" when parents and teachers get together, with support from business and state governments, to wire their school classrooms. (Information about inexpensively wiring your school is available on the home page for Net Day.
• The percentage of school classrooms (K to 12) connected to the Internet in the U.S. has been tripling each year (U.S. Congress, 1995). If this rate continues, every classroom will have at least one Internet connection by the spring of 1999, a widely publicized goal of the Clinton administration.
• Brian Maguire, a third-grade teacher in upstate New York, and a parent in New Jersey have developed a wonderful site for young children to exchange writing and pictures about monsters at MindsEye Monster Exchange. The location includes a chat room, lesson plans, and many other features to support communication and literacy learning between young children at schools around the world. Over 200 classrooms and 6,000 young children have participated in these exchanges.
• Doug Crosby, a first-grade teacher at Cherry Valley School, in Polson, Montana, USA, has had students in his classroom communicating with other students around the globe via e-mail for several years. They have a map above their computer with pieces of yarn from their location to all of the places from which they have received e-mail. Doug's class members share many experiences on their home page.
• Tim Lauer and Beth Rohloff, K to 2 teachers in Portland, Oregon, USA, and their students have written an amazing set of curriculum resources for primary-grade children and have made these available to others on their classroom home page. Students from around the world visit their computer in Oregon to read about Martin Luther King, Jr., bus safety rules, a space alphabet book, and more.

Hundreds of thousands of similar stories take place on the Internet each day as teachers and students explore the potential of this resource to fundamentally redefine what it means to become literate.

Why are these changes taking place? Manguel (1996), in an outstanding new history of reading, notes that the function of literacy has never been static; it continually changes in different historical, cultural, and technological contexts. In earliest societies, literacy was a way to record sheep, crops, and taxes. Among many religions, it was a way to enforce a common dogma. In a post-Reformation world, literacy was viewed as the means to individual salvation by Luther and his Protestant followers. In a Jeffersonian democracy, literacy was seen as essential to the survival of the civic enterprise as informed citizens made reasoned decisions at the ballot box. In an industrial world, literacy was seen as a means to accurately transmit production information from top to bottom in a hierarchically organized company.

In the information age in which we live, literacy is essential to enable individuals, groups, and societies access to the best information in the shortest time so as to identify and solve the most important problems and communicate this information to others. Information access, problem solving, and communication are essential to success in the information age in which we live.

It is no accident the Internet has appeared at this time. The Internet is currently the most efficient way to store, access, and communicate large amounts of information to vast numbers of people interested in identifying and solving important problems. To prepare our students for the challenges of their tomorrows, the Internet and future technologies will be central to our mission. Doug Crosby, Linda Hubbard, Alex and Scott Balson, Brian Maguire, Tim Lauer, Beth Rohloff, and many others are pioneering new forms of literacy within the Internet. The rest of us will quickly follow and homestead these new forms in the years to come. Increasingly, new abilities will be required for literacy in a digital, information age.

Clearly, the Internet is changing what it means to be literate. Traditional reading and writing are but the initial layers of the richer and more complex forms of literacy required in this electronic context. While the exact nature of these changes will continue to evolve, at least four important changes are already apparent.

First, being literate will require our students to acquire new and increasingly sophisticated navigational strategies. On the Internet, where so many new forms of information and communication are available, each of us will be required to learn how to efficiently exploit these forms to accomplish the tasks we determine to be important. The new navigation strategies required in CD-ROM hypermedia have been noted earlier (Bernstein, 1991; Leu & Reinking, 1996). The Internet multiplies this problem many millions of times over, at least once for every website that exists. Our students must learn strategies not only to navigate the browsers used to explore the web but also to effectively navigate each web site they encounter. Each site on the Internet contains information organized in a unique manner. Unitary forms of narrative and expository discourse knowledge, useful in a world of traditional text with static, well-established norms for text organization, will be insufficient in a world of variably designed web pages.

Second, being literate is quickly changing from an end state to an endless developmental process. Increasingly, "becoming literate" is a more precise term than "being literate," reflecting the continual need to update our abilities to communicate within new technologies that regularly appear. Changes in the strategic knowledge required to navigate traditional text environments have been glacial; changes in the strategic knowledge required to navigate Internet environments are meteoric. New versions of web browsers appear every 6 months, and the designs of most websites are updated more frequently than this. Somehow, we must seek ways to support our students in continually acquiring new forms of strategic knowledge as Internet technologies change. Just as Caity discovered that tomorrow has many different meanings, literacy will not be literacy, will not be literacy. Individuals unable to keep up with the new information strategies generated by new information technologies will quickly be left behind.

Third, literacy on the Internet will require new forms of critical thinking and reasoning about the information that appears in this venue. Anyone may publish anything on the Internet. Traditional forces, guaranteeing some degree of control over the accuracy of information in published books, do not exist. As a result, students may sometimes encounter webpages created by people who have political, religious, or philosophical stances that profoundly distort the nature of the information they present to others. Or, sometimes a person simply gets the facts wrong on a webpage. This requires us to help our students become "healthy skeptics" about the accuracy of information they encounter. Such skills have not always been central in classrooms where textbooks and other traditional information resources are often assumed to be correct.

Internet technologies will also change how we become literate. Previously I have argued that electronic contexts for literacy, because they are powerful, complex, and continually changing, will be even more dependent upon social learning strategies than traditional literacy contexts (Leu, 1996). No one person knows everything there is to know about the Internet; each of us has useful information that can help others. I may know something about how to search for information, but you may know a really good location for students who want to publish their work. By sharing our information, we can help one another learn about these rich information resources. Literacy learning on the Internet is best accomplished through social interactions with others, perhaps even more naturally and frequently than in traditional print environments.

As we think about how to use the Internet in our classrooms, we need to look first to instructional practices that take advantage of social learning opportunities. Workshop experiences and cooperative learning activities may be especially useful with the Internet since they allow groups of students to share experiences and learn from one another (Leu & Leu, 1997). In addition, the Internet is also developing its own forms of socially mediated learning, many of which appear to be very promising for classroom instruction. These include listservs, chat sessions, collaborative Internet projects, and teleconferences with CUSeeMe and other technologies. We need to seek ways to use these new technologies to support our students' learning experiences.

If we are to prepare our students for their tomorrows, we need to embrace the opportunities the Internet provides for new forms of literacy. No matter how technologically challenged any one of us feels, each of us must enter this new world and make every attempt to keep up with the changes taking place in what literacy means. Continually becoming literate is as important for us as it is for our students. Consider, for example, these opportunities available on the Internet for our classrooms:

• Seek answers to important questions from experts.
  Students engaged in inquiry projects may e-mail their questions to subject area experts around the world, including astronauts, architects, paleontologists, earth scientists, and many others. Useful lists of e-mail addresses for subject area experts may be found at Ask an Expert or Ask a Mad Scientist.
  
• Participate in a collaborative Internet project at Monarch Watch.
  This location, sponsored by the Department of Entomology at the University of Kansas, Manhattan, contains an extremely comprehensive set of resources for studying Monarch butterflies and sharing observations, especially of their migration. Find out about migration patterns, join one of several science projects, learn how to raise and release Monarchs in your classroom, learn how to start a butterfly garden near your classroom, and communicate with scientists who study these beautiful creatures.
  
• Publish students' writing as you seek more authentic writing experiences for your students.
  A number of locations exist on the Internet where students may publish their writing. Incorporate them into your classroom writing projects and encourage students to revise and edit their works before submitting them for publication. Locations include KidPub,which publishes all submitted work; Stone Soup, which publishes writing and illustrations from children ages8 to 13; and Cyberkids, which invites submissions from students ages 7 to 11.
  
• Enrich your study of another country by developing "key pal" relationships with a classroom in the country you are studying.
  Visit Intercultural E-mail Classroom Connections, Global Heinemann Keypals, or Pitsco's Launch to Keypals to find lists of teachers and classrooms from different parts of the world who are interested in forming collaborative keypal relationships. Or visit Web66 and explore the lists of classrooms around the world connected to the Internet. Send a message to several schools, inviting them to exchange e-mail messages with your class.
  
• Participate in a collaborative Internet project with other classrooms around the world.
  Pay a visit to NickNack's Telecollaborate to learn how to develop these projects. Then visit one of several locations where teachers list their projects in an effort to get others to join their classrooms in a variety of learning activities: The Global Schoolhouse Projects Registry or Kidproject.

As we met Caity after her graduation ceremonies, it was clear how quickly all of the tomorrows from yesterdays past had suddenly become today.

"Dad. Is today tomorrow?"

Caity's question from long ago had acquired a new and even more important meaning as we confronted how quickly the time had passed since she had first entered school. The same will be true for each of the students in our classrooms. Their tomorrows will quickly become their todays. We need to begin, now, to engage our students in the electronic literacies of their future. Each of the experiences listed above, and more to appear in future columns, will help your students become literate within the new technologies appearing on the Internet. The rewards for our students are as important as the futures we wish to provide them.

Bernstein, M. (1991). The navigation problem reconsidered. In E. Berk & J. Devlin (Eds.), Hypertext/hypermedia handbook (pp. 285-298). New York: McGraw-Hill.
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Fillmore, C.J. (1966). Deictic categories in the semantics of "come." Foundations of Language, 2, 219-227.
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Fillmore, C.J. (1972). How to know whether you're coming or going. In K. Huldgaard-Jensen (Ed.), Linguistik 1971 (pp. 369-379). Amsterdam: Athemaiim.
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Fillmore, C.J. (1975). Santa Cruz lectures on deixis. Lecture presented to Indiana Linguistics Club, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.
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Flood, J., & Lapp, D. (1995). Broadening the lens: Toward an expanded conceptualization of literacy. In K.A. Hinchman, D.J. Leu, & C.K. Kinzer (Eds.), Perspectives on literacy research and practice (pp. 1-16). Chicago: National Reading Conference.
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Leu, D.J., Jr. (1996). Sarah's secret: Social aspects of literacy and learning in a digital, information age. The Reading Teacher, 50, 162-165.
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Leu, D.J., Jr., & Leu, D.D. (1997). Teaching with the Internet: Lessons from the classroom. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon.
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Leu, D.J., Jr., & Reinking, D. (1996). Bringing insights from reading research to research on electronic learning environments. In H. van Oostendorp & S. de Mul (Eds.), Cognitive aspects of electronic text processing (pp. 43-76). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
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Manguel, A. (1996). A history of reading. New York: Viking.
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McKillop, A.M. (1996, December). Visual and media literacy: A new look at some old definitions. Paper presented at the meeting of the National Reading Conference, Charleston, SC.
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Murphy, S.M. (1986). Children's comprehension of deictic categories in oral and written language. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 118-131.
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U.S. Congress, Office of Congressional Assessment. (1995). Teachers and technology: Making the connection. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
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