The speed with which the technologies of literacy are changing is dazzling and unsettling. Almost every year, it seems a new way of combining words, images, and video emerges and becomes a phenomenon among students. Meanwhile, teachers are left wondering how to respond to these new ways of writing and reading and the identities that students…

The idea of "slippery texts" provides a useful descriptor for materials that mutate and evolve across different media. Eight adult gamers, encountering the slippery text "American McGee's Alice," demonstrate a variety of ways in which players attempt to manage their attention as they encounter a new text with many resonances. The range of their…