As I was reading an article called "Louise Rsenblatt seeks QtAznBoi@aol.com for LTR: Using chat rooms in interdisciplinary middle school classrooms" for my psycholinguistics class, I was reminded of a question that we struggled with in class discussion. Several people expressed concern about using chat rooms, video games, gang writing, etc. in the classroom for fear of "taking it away" from the studnets. In the article mentioned above, the authors called this "colonizing an aspect of youth culture to accopmlish goals that were not the students' own." Their use of the word colonization really struck a cord with me. It made my fears worse because of the connotation. Should we (teachers) really be looking for ways to include these things in the classroom because kids like using them and use them fluently? Or is this more akin to colonization?