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.

I read your blog frequently for inspiration to share with our English teachers. Today I went to it to mine for free advice. Since I didn’t see any posts alluding to this question, I thought I would ask you directly.
What qualities do you think are necessary for an effective English Dept. chair in the era of Cyber-English? I’ve just been approached to consider serving as an interim English Dept. chair this year and would really appreciate some insight from someone not even remotely connected with our school.

This is such a great question, Pam, and it hits home with me. I was department chair at our school from 1995-2003, when our principal decided department chairs were expendable. CyberEnglish, for me, was born in 2001, so I had two years to be the kind of person you’re asking about. I failed dreadfully.

For one thing, when we began CE, or when I began CE, the rest of the department believed that CE would have two main results:

• force teachers to change the way they teach (they would have to learn new technologies)
• create a division in the “fun-ness” of classes, CE being the fun class and the others being the “boring” classes

I truly think that the rest of my department at that time felt threatened by CE. I was treated with some subtle hostility, and my protection mechanism was to retreat to my sanctuary and do what I knew was right. I had few tools to help me convince my department, other than my anecdotal experience that CE works.

If I had been in the same place today, I would be engulfed in a rich, tech savvy Internet community that is screaming the value of technology integration. There are so many resources to support CE now, that my gentle bombardment of the department with the truth would be impossible to write off as the ravings of a English teacher turned computer geek.

I think of the book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts by Will Richardson that is so compelling about using Blogs and Wikis. Bloggers like David Warlick, Bud Hunt, Ryan Bretag, Ted Nellen, Gail Desler, and Scott McLeod are voices that cannot be ignored.

Studies from PEW/Internet and the National School Boards Association give credence to what CE teachers know and do in the classroom.

Videos like Pay Attention and Learning to Change–Changing to Learn (posted in Polliwog Journal) help teachers see that change is NOT an option.

The CE department chair no longer needs to feel alienated. I imagine that in many districts the directive to change is coming from administration, not just the department chair. In a way, the situation in 2008 is perfect.

And yet, the main thing is to (and I hate this phrase) “walk the walk.” The CE department chair must be a teacher for the department so that they can be teachers for their students. The CE department chair must use and play with all the new tools. She/he must read the blogs, must read the books, articles, surveys, etc. She/he must have a passion for technology in education, but especially in English where it so perfectly aids teachers in their academic goals to increase language arts skills and higher order thinking.

I am no longer department chair, but in the past few years I have had more success than ever in convincing my department that integrating technology is imperative to our success. Our roadblocks now come from other, less manageable sources (see my post on blocking).

Best of luck to you, Pam.

“Make it public” is one of the main tenets of CyberEnglish. It is, in fact, the most important one, I think. Because CE students publish their writing on the Web, anyone could read it. We have agreed that “anyone” includes me, their teacher, but also it includes their parents and other relatives, and of course, their peers. I’ve told this group about Mary Stillwell in New Brunswick who is beginning her CE journey this year. I told them I imagine Ms. Stillwell’s students might be looking at their sites, too.

With this wider audience comes a greater responsibility also. No one wants to look or sound dumb in public, so students generally attend to detail and revise with care. What eventually occurs is the sense that “I am writing for them, but I need to be satisfied with the result myself.” Gone are the days of writing just to please the teacher.

And because the writing is on a Website, presentation (that always fuzzy trait, the plus one trait that seemed so inconsequential) takes on a much greater significance, too.

This week we spoke about readability on the Web. Akin to having good penmanship, I suppose, making design decisions about font and color do affect readability. We never want our audience to be squinting to read.

My daughter, Laura, who works for the Kohler Company as a technology support specialist, is reading a book called Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works, by Janice Redish. As I am the only other person in the family (besides her grandfather) who is geeky about Web design, we were looking at it last week. I was pleased to see many of the same concepts I “preach” about in my CE classes included in this book for adult professionals.

For example:

• Text should not be too big (screaming); plus it’s hard to read. We laughed about this as she told me the story of a woman who only had a small paragraph for a page so she thought she should make it really big to fill the page. Of course, I’ve seen memos on paper created out of that same misapprehension.
• Colors need to enhance text and readability, not interfere. Dark backgrounds make it harder to see text. And certain colors are simply too harsh. For some reason, after reading a student essay on a lime green background, my eyes feel as if I have been staring at the sun.
• Sans serif fonts are easier to read on the Web. Conversely, serif fonts are easier to read on paper. I think it’s interesting and don’t know why this is so, but it’s been studied apparently. I do agree. I think it may have to do with the fact that a computer screen is actually moving constantly. Maybe the serifs have a trailing effect that, while nearly imperceptible, does tire our eyes more.

There are many more important design aspects that good Web designers should keep in mind. The key thing for my students to know is that their design decisions affect their audience.

I know that English teachers talk to students about the importance of audience all the time, but honestly, if students are just writing a daily journal entry in a notebook, their only audience is the teacher and hopefully, themselves. The real power comes with a real audience. And no artificial audience from class workshops to bulletin boards can come close to the power of the Web.

So I was helping them reset their email passwords and showing them how to use the email program by having them send me an email message, something short, something about how they feel about being in CyberEnglish.

Megan wrote:

I think this class will be better than most classes because you don’t have to write a lot; you do most of it on the computer.

This is my reply:

Hah! Megan,

You’ve just expressed one of the most interesting paradoxes of CyberEnglish. Students think that they aren’t doing much writing because it’s on the computer. But we actually do a LOT of writing.

I get this every year. We don’t do much writing in CyberEnglish. I suppose there could be two interpretations there. 1. A student who loves to write thinks he’s being shortchanged. 2. A student who hates to write is pleased. Although, now that I think about it, I bet that student number one is going to recognize that typing is writing.

I had other messages, too, such as “I’m bad at computers (filled with trepidation)” or “I’m no good at English.” But mostly, there was only joyful anticipation, students excited to be in an English class with COMPUTERS.

I wish I could publish them all. They give me motivation to keep going when the going gets tedious, when the bureaucracy gets me down, when it seems like it’s an uphill battle to push the techno envelope.

Today was great. When the bell rings and we close the door, it’s just them and me and the whole world to discover.