Page 21 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of New Media On

XX INTRODUCTION

teacher's pedagogical philosophy in the same ways as online writ-
ing instruction and the questions of how to evaluate the work
produced. This point is at the core of why computer-based compo-
sition remains at the periphery of writing instruction at many
colleges and universities. When assessment drives instruction and
there is no clear way to assess certain classroom activities, it be-
comes difficult for faculty members at some institutions to justify
extensive use of materials that cannot be evaluated given the local
infrastructure and values.
Just as the conventional psychometric understanding of writing
assessment runs counter to many writing specialists' beliefs, for
many compositionists so too does comprehending the place of com-
puter-based composition in the teaching of writing. In either case,
the technologies involved provide a resistance to both historical
product-producer instructional methods and to measurement
through accepted psychometric procedures. This makes it rela-
tively easy for different factions within a writing program or an in-
stitution to dismiss the importance of teaching students through
networked writing, because there is no recognized language avail-
able to writing teachers to explain the significance of having stu-
dents write blogs, in MOOspace, or with hypertext, HTML, XML,
and Perl script in terms of measuring student growth. Conse-
quently, the underlying issue that exists for the current tension
that technology raises for Composition is that very different ideas
are at work for discussing students' knowledge making and knowl-
edge producing in the writing process. We are still learning the lan-
guage of how to describe and define what these knowledge making
and knowledge producing processes are in the networked class-
room space. Until such language becomes clearer for writing in-
structors, as Yancey (1999) outlined, creating a sense of coherence
as to what we want from a student's electronic text or electronic
portfolio is slippery at best.
However, some common points can link networked writing situ-
ations and writing assessment—the mystery is that writing spe-
cialists have not yet found where those commonalities lie. The
Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) out of the University of
Minnesota, for instance, proposes having an "industry standard"
for electronic portfolios so that the look generates a sort of surface
validity. Another commercialized system, LiveText, offers the ge-
neric rubric-based model for examining students' work from P-col-