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.

I recently created a unit for my juniors called Writing Letters That Matter, for which teams of students research a political issue that they care about and write a letter to one of their national or state representatives. It’s a neat little unit and it meets all kinds of standards (not that I care that much about standards, but you know).

And because I like to integrate web resources, I have all kinds of links embedded into the unit plans. So it was with this in mind that I thought, “Oh, cool,” this morning as I listened to the story about Street Team ‘08 on NPR. Street Team is an initiative of MTV that gets college students across the nation to cover local issues as “citizen journalists” and blog, podcast, etc. about their experiences. The hope is that these embedded “journalists” can both explore political issues important to young people and also generate disscussions via Web 2.0 tools. Eventually they hope to get young people to care enough to vote.

Earlier in the year, I had hoped, in a class Blog, to show my English 11 students that bloggers are becoming truly democratic voices and this Street Team concept only reinforces that. This all sounds great, right?

Here’s the bad part. Today, when I got to school, I tried to get to the Street Team ‘08 site, but it was blocked due to its content: digital music, etc. And this is the story of the year: block, block, block;  federal law prohibits . . . .  I feel like all I hear this year is “no” or “we can’t.”

I still do not fully comprehend the vast paranoia about kids and the Internet. I know there are predators out there. I know that serious and dangerous situations have occurred.  But I also know that if we blind our kids and muffle their ears and refuse to teach them how to be citizens of the Internet world, they will be at a far greater risk than they would be than if we were brave enough as a nation to acknowledge that our kids are digital kids anyway who will find all kinds of ways around our blocks (ever meet a kid who has defied his parents’ ultimatum?) and will be in that world whether we like it or not. We would be wise to teach them how to navigate safely. And some of us like that world, the Internet world, fraught with danger as it is.

Is the real world not also fraught with danger? How many of us, as parents, actually fulfill our “promise” to lock our kids up until they’re 21. Of course we don’t. It’s silly.

In the same way it is silly to restrict Internet access in schools and thereby restrict teachers’ ability to teach their students.

Democracy is best when people engage with other people in discussion about who we are as a people and what is best for us and who will best lead us. The truth is that many of these discussions happen online these days.

Juniors are primarily 17-year-0lds who are on the cusp of full citizenship, ready in only a year to vote. How can I explain to them how important it is to write letters to their representatives when those same representatives do not respect their right to know? With all the new laws, are we protecting our children or are we muting their voices?