Page 105 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of New Media On

74 CHAPTER 3

which confound traditional understandings of writing assessment
as being a singular, individual effort that measures a singular stu-
dent's achievement.
Earlier in the book I raised two questions that can now be ad-
dressed in this chapter: Can writing faculty evaluate written work
that is completely owned by the students, particularly on a large-
scale or a departmental setting, especially if an entire class devel-
ops into its own literate community and so understands the lan-
guage, the contexts and texts, and the adaptability of the
discourse to communicate with others? Or is the culture of Com-
position such that student writing will never be fully owned by its
writers and will always have, to varying degrees, the teacher
overriding or overwriting the final submission? To this, let me add
a third question to be answered later in this chapter: Can techno-
logical convergence transform writing assessment into a more
humane process?

CAN STUDENTS EVER FULLY CLAIM OWNERSHIP OF THEIR
WRITTEN WORK IN NETWORKED CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENTS?

Convergence brings us new sets of techniques, knowledge, motiva-
tions to write, and skills that reflect multiple literacies that cut across
lines of race, class, gender, and physical ability. The merging of these
two technologies requires instructors to present writing differently
and to evaluate it in some other way. Through technological conver-
gence, language becomes a tool for both a writer's entertainment and
her information. Lecturing is nearly eliminated, and students work
collaboratively or independently on inquiry-based or problem-solv-
ing tasks. As such, college composition is simply no longer a process
leading to a product; instead, writing becomes central to a communi-
cation system—a network filled with information, verbal play, re-
sources, and discursive exchanges with others. Student writers come
to see themselves as "information creators" (Wickliff, in Yancey &
Weiser, 1997, p. 328) who use various literacies to solve very specific,
pragmatic communication problems. Moreover, as the United States
District Court in Lincoln, Nebraska, decided in 1998, students who
write in networked spaces are published authors, because the web is
considered a legal publication forum.
These points not only change the well-documented accounts of al-
tering the classroom dynamic found in most articles about comput-