It is a very well known fact that people of today's modern society spend more time with the media than with any other activities in their daily life. Quite a few times we have heard that children probably spend far more time watching television and using the computer than they do learning in the classroom.

The global marketplace and the communications and entertainment industries are driving the fast evolution of regional, national, and global information infrastructures that enhance our abilities to access and interlink materials in remote archives. These powerful channels for transmitting data allow us to communicate and learn across barriers of distance and time. As a result, the means for creating, delivering, and using information in business, government, and society are swiftly changing.

Although there are many other more important reasons to foster media education, just having to face life as a free person in the Information Society would be enough by itself to make some kind of media education or media literacy not only useful but necessary. To successfully prepare students as workers and citizens in democratic societies, we, as educators must incorporate experiences into the curriculum that enable students to create and utilize new forms of expression and new information and audiovisual technology.

A simple and traditional definition of literacy could be the ability to communicate through reading and writing. This definition, however, will only refer to textual/alphabetic literacy. Today we must also consider a variety of literacies: visual literacy, media literacy, information literacy, technology literacy, etc. By the end of the twentieth century the range of information media has expanded to include not only books and television but also computers, advanced information networks, satellite communications, and satellite broadcasting. Global information networks are being developed, enabling information to be transmitted and received everywhere and in different forms. We consider multimedia literacy the development of skills to understand the meanings of multimedia messages and produce similar ones as a way of expression. We use multimedia literacy as an umbrella term which covers alphabetic literacy and media literacy:

• the ability to obtain desired information from the vast quantities of information available in different media and to use that information efficiently to produce communication in a variety of forms.

• The ability to understand how media construct meaning and to read critically beyond the lines of the printed or audiovisual messages, and the implications of them.

Media literacy has been defined as that which is concerned with helping students develop an informed and critical understanding of the nature of the mass media, the techniques used by them, and the impact of these techniques. More specifically, it is education that aims to increase students' understanding and enjoyment of how media work, how they produce meaning, how they are organized, and how they construct reality. Media literacy also aims to provide students with the ability to create media products. (Ontario Ministry of Education, 1989).

Masterman in Teaching the Media (1985) characterises media literacy as pupils' understanding of how the media work, pupils' understanding of how they produce meaning; of the messages from mass media; pupils' understanding of how media production systems are organized and the construction of reality in mass media. The Multimedia Education we propose takes from media education the basic objectives of developing critical viewing skills; it also takes from information literacy the developing of the ability to deal with information (find, analyse, evaluate, use, produce, etc.) from a variety of sources and different media. We pay special attention to the production of messages by the students. Media education has been more focussed on the deconstruction than on the construction of messages. So far its main objective has been enlarging pupils' critical understanding of mass media messages. However we have to consider that new media will allow anybody to create and send his message to the air of cyberspace.

Multimedia education, by using current AV and Information Technology, should provide students with opportunities to develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to produce communication in a variety of forms and media, to develop a personal autonomy and a critical awareness that will allow them to achieve a better society for all. Formal education has an important role to play in Multimedia Education by incorporating new media into schools in three different and interconnected ways as shown in the figure: - as learning tools, - as subject matter, and - as a means of informal education. Multimedia Education and New Information Technologies Integration into curriculum development: