The Polliwog Journal

Henry Jenkins from MIT predicts that we are facing a change in culture comparable to the Renaissance, which he says will proceed from a convergence of media. Technological Convergence, says Jenkins, has come from the digitization of all media content. “When words, images and sounds are transformed into digital information, we expand the potential relationships between them and enable them to flow across platforms,” he says. Those who are using Web 2.0 tools are leading the revolution.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman believes these changes will stand with Gutenberg’s printing press in impacting the world. Friedman says we now have a “global web-enabled platform for multiple forms of sharing knowledge and work irrespective of time, distance, geography and increasingly even language.”  That platform, Friedman says, “explains more things about what’s happening in the world today than any other framework.”

As a result, Friedman argues, we have to horizontalize ourselves and adapt to this new platform that more and more people can plug and play on.  He describes the process of horizontalizing as “having to learn to adapt our business practices and study habits,  our innovative approaches to this new platform, because we’re going from a world where value is created in vertical silos of command and control [top down] to a world where value will be created increasingly horizontally by who you connect and collaborate with.”

The phrase “value will be created increasingly . . . by who you connect and collaborate with” struck me most profoundly.  My personal experience with horizontalizing began in the late 90’s when I joined a lively and engaging group of English teachers via a list serv. In 2001, I followed Ted Nellen’s lead and started CyberEnglish at SFHS, a class that expressly strives to be horizontal: make it public, peer review, and pass it on. Ted is a genius! He understood convergence long before nearly everyone I know.

When Pat Schulze (from South Dakota) and I (from Wisconsin) used a Moo on Saturday mornings to plan a new unit, we were horizontalizing and we didn’t even know it. We just knew that what we were doing was really, really cool.

More recently I have seen how Web 2.0 tools like Blogs, Wikis and Nings allow us to connect and collaborate irrespective of time, distance, or geography. I manage two Nings and belong to four others. I cannot believe the collective wisdom in those Nings, wisdom freely shared.

Vertical silos have failed me for a long, long time. I realized back in those early list serv days that the people who can most teach me what I need to know are not my bosses. Because we are so stridently homogenized in our geographical space, even my peers, who are fabulous teachers, have not been the catalysts for change I have needed.

It is my Ning friends, my Blog buddies, my global connections who continue to drive me. They’re my teachers. Some days, maybe I am their teacher. We plug in and play in the wealth of ideas that the Web freely gives us, like genius flowing so fast through our fingers we cannot hold it all.

Convergence.

Friedman also says that nobody has told the kids about the shift in technologies that have flattened the world. But it seems to me that the Facebook generation understands the tools better than their parents, better, frankly, than most adults. Teens and young adults create and share content. They text in a new language invented for that purpose.  Even the verbs are new: text, tweet, friend, etc. They upload, download, and share files. Because they use the Web tools that allow them to connect and collaborate across time and distance, they understand the uses of this new platform.

But that may be the extent of it. They manage their profiles, post pictures, tag friends, friend friends’ friends, but do my students understand that the way they effortlessly communicate and collaborate on the Web means they are already at work in the new global web-enabled platform? I’m not sure. I doubt it. If not, whose job is it to present them with these ideas?

It is mine.

As teachers, we may tell our students that they are members of a global community in unprecedented ways. But what does that mean to them? It’s an idea far too abstract for the prefrontal cortext of most 15-year-olds. To be honest, the idea isn’t even quite clear to most teachers.  Sometimes I think teachers like to tell students pretty words. Instead, let’s have them read The World is Flat or Jenkins’ Blog? I love Romeo and Juliet as much as the next English teacher, and I do think Shakespeare has a lot to teach us, but I worry that we are helping to trap our children in vertical silos when we do not help them see just exactly how their cell phones enable them to fully engage in the 21st century.