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Introduction
When designing telecommunications curriculum project models, the Natcom associations wanted to suggest types of online content which would help teachers identify the literacy opportunities within projects and thus maximise the potential of the project and medium for helping students develop literacy skills. Community pressure to address literacy concerns, plus educational debates about the impact of information technologies in shaping new literacies, merged into a concept titled a Literacy Walk which is both a process and a resultant product. Natcom associations envisage that all telecommunications projects they develop from the models of activity will be complemented by a literacy walk during project design and implementation. They encourage other groups to do the same.

The literacy walk is a process for analysing a project and curriculum. The descriptions about this process may become online content. Teachers engaging in this content, will participate in a professional development process. Helping students become involved in literacy activities in the projects, is a curriculum process. Reflecting on teachers' reactions to the literacy ideas, is a project management process. Collating this knowledge into wisdom about the role of telecommunications projects in Australian education, is a process for Natcom associations and others to undertake as their practical experience complements how to interpret the impact of telecommunications technologies on learning and teaching. The literacy walk is therefore a complex concept that needs to be viewed from multiple perspectives, to be understood.

Interpreting literacy in the context of an information economy era is important to begin now. The medium permeates our lives. How people use the technology permeates their lifestyles and opportunities to participate in and contribute to, society. Teachers need to help children take advantage of new interfaces and online environments, new options, media and structures for expression, and new circumstances in which to find, interpret and use information. Although traditional literacies need recontextualising in the new media, there is also a beginning of an entirely new set of literacies that will determine how well students navigate their lives. The literacy walk intends to address both traditional literacies and thus answer the concerns of the community but also challenges teachers to think broadly about their new responsibilities for helping their students.

A definition of literacy
In this model for activity, a broad definition of literacy emphasises the interconnectedness between the variety of literacy skills that are important to the current and future lives of young Australians. Literacy includes the ability to comprehend, process and develop print-based materials, online digital information, other digital information, television and video media, and graphic information generally. It includes the notions of hypertext and virtuality as well as linear genres and the use of literacy skills in the development and design processes as well as during analytical processes.

It extends far beyond the interaction with linear, text-based products, usually identified as literacy. It includes notions of digital literacy, which encompass the ability to work confidently and effectively within computer-based environments and with digital products such as encoders, remote controls, digital pads, touch screens and non-traditional computer formats. It also includes taking advantage of the new technologies that are designed to help people navigate online environments and provide online services. The ability to use, manipulate and perhaps design, the intelligent devices (sometimes called bots) in virtual worlds, may well determine who best manages the next generation of online environments. There are literacy experiences in most things people do online and opportunity always exists to emphasise literacy within all curriculum activities. The Literacy Walk seeks to identify and capitalise on literacy activities, plus model a literacy in itself. Finally, the literacy walk includes a notion of OPERATIONAL literacy – it considers the interface and the manipulation of the interface (hypertext, virtual world etc) as the basic reading/writing skills of the digital medium.

The concept of a literacy walk
"Literacy walk" is a term used metaphorically to capture the spirit of walking through a landscape of activities where the literacy opportunities are pointed out and where the resultant walk is then built for others to follow. Therefore, the process of experiencing or planning a walk, is both a product and a literacy. This model for a literacy walk can be used by everyone; as a tool when planning online activity for teachers and students, for building online information and processes, and during learning activities for students, parents and the community.

Project designers should undertake a literacy walk of their project. This will occur multiple times during project conceptualisation, development and implementation thus ensuring that literacies are embedded in the activity, concept and subject matter of each project. Each walk will become new online content for teachers and for students. For teachers, a literacy walk will define literacies and illustrate how to engage students in literacy activities within the context of the new media which are changing the definitions of literacies while complementing existing ones. For students, it will act as a role for writing genres, writing processes in all media and development and use of virtual worlds. Project designers will develop much stronger project designs by undertaking literacy walks of their projects.

Although the literacy walk is a process, the product of such walks can be represented in a web-based environment. These may be static webs but should not be. New tools enabling new interfaces for online content can be used to capture the spirit of walking through a landscape with a guide and engaging the reader or user in activities that continue to build the landscape. The virtuality of new interfaces promise to help teachers engage in new thinking about literacy. It is expected that new tools for conducting walks and engaging in publishing will emerge over the next few years and become integral to how teachers collectively build online content and new learning experiences in a virtual-world environment. These 'worlds' are likely to include online intelligent helper systems and online guides which interact with users and help them navigate, learn and contribute to web sites. Thus the product of a walk may not be a static or dynamic web. It may be that virtuality creates new kinds of online professional development programs that integrate with more traditional forms such as static webs, online courses and face-to-face programs. The concept of a literacy walk offers opportunity for a new group of pioneers to discover ways of integrating literacy issues into educational programs.

Perspectives of a literacy walk
A literacy walk is a process of identifying the literacies inherent in online activities. This process should identify traditional literacy activities plus explore those literacies and experiences which are unique to the online environment. For this model to have an impact on education, all activities need to have a future-oriented approach and provide students with the new life skills. It is likely that literacy walks will

address new ways to engage in the deconstruction and reconstruction process to interpret and develop information in new media and online environments

explore new genres and consider the impact of hypertext on how we write and present information, understand existing information and think. Already people "think" in hypertext.

use and exploit the potential of virtual environments as learning places, gathering places and writing places. The convergence of genre in these environments will alter what the community understands as literacy.

be representative of the new interfaces and new ways in which people interact online line with information and personal communities.

make use of tools which enable people to develop their own environments and their own interface to the web. These tools may include online programmable devices, use of online guides, databases which require little technical knowledge and interface development tools. The literacy walks should help people gain high levels of mastery over their online learning and development of online sites as well as be a model for new ways of manipulating the online environment to suit education.

Roles for a literacy walk
A literacy walk creates paths or processes for people to follow. The resultant product provides a pathway for teachers to experience ideas grouped into themes. Such experiences might be self-paced, self-directed or perhaps part of professional community experiences. They should be highly interactive. The travelling of a path is then a process for teachers, where new knowledge and exposure to new ideas is professional development. The path may also collect ideas from teachers about curriculum ideas, practical implementation considerations and samples of teacher materials and student work. Project managers, teachers and community members who want to understand how teachers are developing current and future literacy demands might construct a walk or participate in a walk developed by others. A literacy walk should be a helpful assistant to teachers, observers and stakeholders.

A literacy walk should create a professional community where knowledge about new literacies and the meeting of traditional and new literacies is developed and shared. If cultures of sharing and adding to the scenery of a walk become mainstream practice, an active community should continue to add to what we know about the relationships between literacies and the new media of the Internet. The walk should have links to people, experts, early adopters and other teachers who are exploring the literacies embedded in projects. If vibrant professional community is not developed, the online content of a literacy walk may be difficult to maintain.

A literacy walk is likely to be a digital experience where the process of building and following a walk is a new literacy. It may look like a "walk-through" via text at first, but is likely to develop towards the three-dimensional fly-throughs we see in multimedia where guides interact with us and "show us" through. Users may interact with a virtual world which they navigate to construct their own walks or pathways. Regardless of the appearance of the products of the literacy walks constructed by stakeholders and user-communities, they are a new way of understanding and exploiting the learning potential of the new media, and thus are a new literacy in themselves.

A literacy walk should be a curriculum model which teachers can learn to develop and use. It should help teachers integrate digital experiences into curriculum implementation and sometimes be the focus. Literacy walks can do more than help teachers address traditional literacy concerns. The professional community needs to develop the new curriculum around digital literacies and the new literacies of a Internet-based communication system. Literacy walks may become a model for dealing with the new literacy curriculum.

New literacy ideas
The ideas shared here are bound by a belief that educators can not restrict their understanding of what literacy means to traditional genre, media or processes. Although literacy walks will help teachers identify opportunities to help students develop traditional genres and literacy skills, it is assumed in this model and need not be emphasised. Instead, literacy walks must help educators engage in the new literacies. The medium is not a neutral tool in the literacy debates and will cause teachers identify new ideas, new directions and build the next generation of educational literacy outcomes. This section points to some possible new ideas and alternative frames for interpreting literacies in the contexts of online learning or learning within online communities.

There will be a mix of traditional genres and new genres in literacy activities in schools regardless of whether the Internet is directly involved. In the same way that technological concepts embed themselves in language, processes and attitudes in all aspects of life, the new online genres are increasingly part of everyday culture and community as well as work processes and communities. URLs appear in advertising. Television shows use Internet sites and interactive chats as part of programming. Radio stations broadcast live and embed listener email into disc jockey chatter. The terminology of the net is increasingly apparent in how we express ideas. The synthesis of genres comes from the context which surrounds education and can not be omitted from considerations of literacy activities in curriculum.

The new genres may reinvent interest in traditional genres. Students, part of the n-generation (new online cultures and cultures of youth influenced by connectedness), rely on literacy skills to participate in their culture. Situatedness in this culture is determined by abilities to communicate through email, chat and other synchronous tools and environments. Status is gained through development of personal web pages. Embedded in these new literacies, are skills from traditional literacies. Teachers have opportunity to capitalise on new motivation to communicate, because it is highly relevant to students' personal lives, as well as potential to future life skills and careers.

Hypertext offers new connections between ideas. The non-linear nature of most online genres and interactions enables teachers to help students make the connections between concepts and to thus communicate these links. Hypertext is the common organisational structure in web publishing and is the structure for links between online tools. For example, while working in a web page, people link to email programs. Chat programs link to other synchronous tools; for example, ICQ to Netmeeting ( two community building tools). Web environments may host multi-user virtual worlds. Connectedness is transparent, but is a powerful conceptual framework for the new ways people work. This connectedness automatically encourages higher-order thinking skills in ways that seem simpler than achieving the same mapping in linear genres.

Hypertext provides an organisational structure for information and is thus a new genre to interpret and communicate. Interpreting hypertextually-organised information involves interpreting the non-textual clues that are embedded in the links between ideas, images and pages in a web. These links may provide multiplicity of audience paths that the writer intended, may help the reader read several stories at once and may be a way of illustrating the concept map which links the components together. Reading non-textual clues is important in new environments and represents a new genre which writers can use to communicate meaning. The impact of reader choice is challenging and new to consider in hypertext genres, when children are writing. Hypertext environments impact considerably on the conventions of the writing process and product and will need to be explored by teachers helping student develop literacy skills for the new media.

The crucial problem in the digital medium is not the text but the dimension, the operational literacy required to navigate and how meaning is embedded in the links themselves and in the connections between media now possible. The link between the television show, the web site of the show, the weekly online guest in the chat rooms and the now dynamic culture for fans who interacts with each online is just one example of connectedness and new skills required to navigate and participate. We need to learn to deconstruct and reconstruct the events rather than the texts. The crucial problem in the digital medium is not the text but the dimension, the operational literacy required to navigate. .

The traditional process of literacy will be redefined. In the discourse community of the next generation of online environments, deconstruction and reconstruction may be different. Participants will take a more active role in adding to text and may be the text. The more experienced our ability to deconstruct the literate event, the more confounding it is to discover we cannot ‘read’ (in other terms, navigate) the piece in front of us. This perceived weakness in reading (deconstructing) turns readers into foreigners in the new spaces. It undermines an established faith in our ability to appreciate the social, cultural and critical aspects of the text. The literacy walk needs to be an experience that moves toward developing this operational aspect so that the target group (stakeholders, teachers and their students) can have the confidence to apply their own critical appreciation and understanding of content – the web pages, the tasks, the projects etc.

The literacy walk needs to take advantage of the fact that it will be presented in the very medium it is intended to illuminate. It is intended to do this by utilising the virtuality of the medium. That is, by creating a number of virtual simulations of ICT interfaces and by deconstructing and reconstructing them, the process of developing walks will take advantage of developing ICT technologies, shockwave, virtual assistants, smart databases etc. The literacy walker may find themselves invited to ‘play’ in order to learn. Participating will be a digital literacy experience.

Authentic audience is prominent in telecommunications. Students sharing with unknown audiences may generate links to new people and may generate enthusiasm when online students work creates a communication to a new audience. Such results are hit and miss at best. However students who publish for and to known groups and particular people, say the partners in a curriculum process, are more likely to receive feedback and participate in interactions. Writing to known audiences is an approach to traditional literacy which can be translated into the new media. If curriculum activities generate communication with a known and defined audience, they will further the literacy skills of students. Authentic audience is a concept which needs to be preserved to avoid the publishing-to-the-fridge-door-in-the-sky phenomenon, usual in schools web publishing and email projects. Online activities can involve an audience for students' questions, investigations, projects, debates and ideas. These audiences can be accessed through a variety of media and should not be limited to web-publishing ideas.

There is a link between online tools, genres and the purposes of activities. Teachers will have positive dispositions to ideas which link learning to the learning technology tools embedded in online activities. Teachers may need advice about how to select these tools when embedding literacy ideas into online activities. For example, chat environments with short and rapid interaction may be suited to brainstorming activities. Threaded discussions might host more substantial arguments on issues. Multi-user environments may be places to host role plays. Multi-user environments might also be hosts for creative invention and dynamic interactions. Hypertext might help students organise ideas and connect concepts. Email might suit question posing and reflection. Exchanging sound and voice might help students communicate with a variety of senses. Understanding the connection between genre and online tools will help teachers select appropriate tools for learning experiences.

The digital literacies impact on the literacy process in subtle ways. Using the new media alters our construction and deconstruction process. The asynchronous nature of email creates new expectations about interaction. We understand there will be a delay in conversations and become concerned when to much time passes between interactions. Frequent email users conduct multiple simultaneous conversations in fragmented ways compared to voice exchanges and organise their communication and tasks differently. Seasoned users of web environments work within the limitations of the technology. The time to download pages impacts on click-response times and users decide whether to wait for a page to download completely before asking for the next page. This impacts on design as well as comprehension skills. The ability of the user to understand web browsers and other tools, significantly impacts on their ability to comprehend quickly, make cognitive links and communicate effectively and efficiently. Digital literacy skills are part of the literacy process.

The tools and processes in this media are not neutral. This media like all technological spaces and tools are not neutral. They are not "just a tool" or "just a process", in the same way that it is foolhardy to claim that television is "just a neutral tool" to entertain children. Online environments alter how people work, learn and play, who they communicate with and what they communicate about. Online environments provide access to ideas, opinions and knowledge which has been interpreted by online writers and publishers. It is important that students have an appreciation of the social and cultural context which surround the literacies of the new media and online cultures. Further the affective domain of students will be stimulated by their online experiences. Communication is a complex process which is shaped by the contexts and emotions which stimulate interaction and in the online context, the media has a significant impact.

In online environments, the dimension of time affects literacy. This added dimension to literacy affects both the comprehension and synthesis process and the construction process. Communication by synchronous and asynchronous media is quite different to writing an essay to be published in a paper-based media. Streaming media alters how we construct and comprehend information. The life of a product and its impact may not be the same in online cultures as it is in print-based culture. The issue of loss of history in web development and in synchronous environments impacts on messages sent and received. The sense of never-being -completed of web publishing is complex and alters how we understand the writing process. The dimension of time alters our understanding of literacy generally and it is a major factor in online environments.

Online environments can remove or reduce the hierarchical structures of publishing. This characteristic of the Internet impacts on how the community understands, critiques and uses it. For some, the issue is about publishing without the intervening (interfering) process of editors, publishers and publishing houses. For others this causes a lack of authority and a diminishing of truth. These ideas raise the significance of first and second hand sources of information and how authority might be redefined as access to original ideas of people rather than published texts. Teachers then need to consider the genres which make sense for students to practice given the contexts of online environments. Do letters to editors stand up as authentic activities in the new world? What new genres exist? What traditional genres need re-inventing in school curricula? The changing hierarchical patterns can empower students to undertake action, can alter how they can connect with their audiences, and can alter how they interpret the world's information.

Online environments encourage abstract thinking and thus alter the literacy processes. The nature and structure of online environments cause students to construct abstract models of information as they comprehend information and communicate. They need to think in abstract terms while working in online environments. Multi-user environments in particular are conceptualised around abstract ideas and places and users work in the abstract rather than the concrete. Interpretative processes from online interactions, naturally engage students in higher-order thinking and communication in this environment is usually abstract in nature and plays on the abstract nature of the new literacies.

Examples of Literacy Walk models
A literacy walk is a dynamic and continuous event and each may be represented differently or contain different ideas. The literacy walk may have different interfaces for different roles some people play. An engine room of tools might only be available to the project manager and leading educators. The products may appear as static pathways through combinations of ideas, or the walks might appear as a virtual landscape in which users interact with ideas, online robots or teachers who regularly use the facility. The following ideas illuminate some principles and ideas described earlier in this paper.

Literacy harvest
A literacy harvest could collect ideas for and examples of literacy opportunities from telecommunications curriculum project activities produced by Natcom and other project management groups and use them examples of digital produce. These examples might be developed in a virtual world environment or developed in a typical web-based environment, perhaps with a database working in the engine room beneath the site. The activities would demonstrate to project managers how to draw attention to literacy ideas, how to implement them and suggest ideas for future development. The key element of each example would be that each would confront the literacy agendas and suggest practical strategies for teachers to include them in curriculum activities while participating in projects. Such a harvest could collect teachers' ideas, students' samples of work and professional associations interpretations of telecommunications curriculum projects. Examples could link off to explanations, further examples, professional development material and generally act as professional content which would develop news literacy skills, particularly those new literacies described in this paper.

If developed as a virtual environment for a community place, peer discussion and professional development discussion could occur. Teachers could meet. Groups or individuals could undertake leadership positions in the community place and thus continue to add to the richness of content to the by recording the knowledge from professional communities. The tools would enable them to add to the site. They might even be able to develop their own branch or 'room' to attach to the site, adding their specialised knowledge and presence to the environment.

Virtual environments could then be enhanced by virtual assistants (bots), able to discuss (sic) the constructive process and advise of other pages in the walk that might be relevant. Teachers could take on adviser roles too and support novice peers or experiment with the genres of virtual worlds.

Digital galleries
A digital gallery concept enables teachers and students to construct walks though their own work and the work of others: that is, expression of student-centred or teacher-centred thinking to known and unknown audiences. Where the "harvest" is a discussion of the social, cultural and critical aspects of the produce of the suite of projects, the "digital gallery" is an opportunity to display and explain. The digital portfolios might occupy a gallery area of the virtual world described above or may represent a route through the literacy walk in their own right

A crucial element of this concept is that students and/or teachers can speak to their audiences either directly synchronously or perhaps through a bot which they have programmed to interact with visitors to the gallery. Using sound, video, graphics and text would enable students and teachers to narrate the gallery, exploring the new dimensions of web-based and virtual world literacies. The value for teachers visiting the site, is that they see the literacy student experience and begin to understand that people may be the new texts of online environments.

Pathway creation
In this more conventional view of a literacy walk, pathways are created and used. Project managers may build a number of types of routes or pathways; some for resource builders, some for teachers and some for students. They may be pathways though a project, through a web site or through a collection of sites. They may be developed through themes of ideas or be a comprehensive view of a project or web site, pointing out the literacy opportunities and ideas inherent in the design of the project or web. They are the most passive view of a literacy walk being somewhat like tourist views of a project or web.

For walkers, the experience of undertaking the walk may be quite passive. Walkers may dip in and out walks. There may be no beginning and no ending to the path. It may be possible to jump paths. They will take advantage of the hypertextuality of the web. Even so. the pathways view of the literacy walk is limited to recorded interpretations of a person(s) view of literacy in a project.

A maturer version of this pathways view would include enabling teachers and students to create their own pathway or add to the collections of pathways for others to use. A pathways view could take advantage of and use databases so that walkers may add their own resources where appropriate and thus add value as they walk. In many ways the pathway creation will be a more formal version of the digital portfolio aspect.

For example: A user enters the literacy walk as a teacher interested in running a project with say, global youth forum. From either an index or map, they choose to take the teacher’s tour. There are examples of previous teacher experiences with this project available for view. There are links to classroom support activities, many of which will have been entered by other teachers who have done the same project. The same route also offers links to support (admin, colleagues) and invites the teacher to return with feedback and new activities generated by the specific instance of the project. This offers recognition and a partnership in the continued life of the walk.

The digital literacy approach
This approach exploits the operational aspects of the ‘reading’ of the digital environment and exploring its depth. This approach is an immersive approach. Participants are encouraged via three different styles to participate in and add to the walk environment. The first mode is the explore mode. This is a particular literacy walk intended to explore the depth of the interface and to expose the operational aspects of the digital medium via a process of ‘playing with the parts’. This would be constructed in a program such as shockwave and invite participants to ‘play’ with the medium. The second mode of the walk is the ‘show and tell’ demonstration. This would be constructed within an environment where it is easy to combine image and synchronous communication and where the virtual assistants would live. The third mode is the more familiar, offering web-based routes to links and materials, feedback and support. A new dimension of this third mode is the participative aspect. It will be this third mode that will offer the links and two-way communication with traditional literacy while the harvest will encourage links from within the other Natcom projects to other available literacy resource materials.

The bot view - help assistant
A bot in this work generally refers to a simple ‘chatter’ robot which appears to interact intelligently with users of an interface.. These entities depend on key words and react to key events. Their conversation is limited but they can easily be programmed to respond with specific speeches or to specific questions.

Each aspect of the walk in its primary modes will offer support and feedback opportunities via email, phone and established communications. However within the DEMO mode there is an opportunity to activate primitive chatterbot assistants. Some of these will be mere guides and narrators, some will be there to encourage further exploration and some will be added by the students themselves as spokespeople for their work.