Henry Jenkins’ whitepaper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, pdf at http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org/etc… seems to be (I haven’t read it yet…) a very good outline of what new media literacy is.

Found it via Peter Morville http://www.findability.org/archives/000138.php, who sums it up as follows:

“Henry presents eleven new skills or literacies…

Play – the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem solving.

Performance – the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery.

Simulation – the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes.

Appropriation – the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.

Multitasking – the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition – the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities.

Collective Intelligence – the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal.

Judgment – the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources.

Transmedia Navigation – the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities.

Networking – the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information.

Negotiation – the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

…and three concerns:

The Participation Gap – the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow.

The Transparency Problem – the challenges young people face in learning to see clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world.

The Ethics Challenge – the breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media makers and community participants.”

[end of quote]

Note: these are “new” literacies. I’d say they add to competencies as knowing how to write –as in: constructing sentences that makes sense and can be understood by others… :-)