Invitation to English Companion Book Club

As I write this invitation, it is the last day of 2009 and we are overlooking the start of not only a new year but a new decade! In a more literal sense, I am overlooking the little lake that is outside our home on this snowy morning here in Ohio. My wife, Stephanie, and I are enjoying our first months in our new home, and we’ve been told that some of the neighborhood kids go ice skating here once the ice gets sturdy enough. It makes me wonder if there will be a kind of Currier and Ives scene outside our window, or a replication of Mr. Pickwick’s Christmas morning comedic spectacle with him and his friends tumbling around on the frozen water.

Yet, as I look over this frosty winter scene, I’m sitting inside typing this on my laptop computer, writing this invitation to you that will be read via a social networking platform called English Companion Ning, originally created by one person—Jim Burke-- only one year ago with now over 10,000 participants. I must confess that, as I write this, I’ve also got one of my iTunes playlists going and am checking my Twitter feed and chatting with two friends on Facebook, one of whom is in Europe. And don’t even get me started on email. What a juxtaposition between the old and new, the classic (now called “retro”) and the yet-to-be-imagined!

Yes, this is the world we English teachers live in, isn’t it? I hope we can talk about the challenges and opportunities of this new world in the next few weeks as this book club will focus on my new book, The Socially Networked Classroom: Teaching in the New Media Age. We are caught in the marvelous tension that exists within this profession that owes its very existence to page-based print texts. What are we to be about in this world of new literacies?

This is the core question I’ve been asking teachers around the country and around the world for the last 15 years. The result is a real-world chronicle, I think, complete with lesson plans, sample assignments and assessments that teachers are using as they attempt to navigate this slippery, rapidly changing surface. This is not a cheerleading book. The teachers I interviewed are struggling with the barriers that we all encounter—lack of technology, lack of support, lack of time, and, of course, a continuing societal obsession with standardized curriculum and testing. But these teachers are also persevering as you must be, or else you wouldn’t be reading this. I hope you will take a few moments and jump into my book and then jump into the conversation we will be holding here.

I look forward to talking with you on the ECNing or here in the coming weeks and to writing some new “chapters.”