Page 34 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of New Media On

IMTERMETWORKED WRITING 3

It is the "public" characteristic of online writing that infuses the
words with meaning and elevates them to a communicative act. To
write publicly means that student writers make their words avail-
able to all in the course or in cyberspace, not just for the exclusive
private classroom relationship built on paper between student
writer and instructor or the semi-public partnership peer groups
evoke. Following Freire, then, in genuine public discourse settings,
such as those found online, the instructor is not the sole authentica-
tor for student thought as he or she most likely is in private class-
room contexts. The instructor's voice is just one of many voices
responding to the words. The polysemic quality and the concept of
transforming the classroom writing experience into a real, commu-
nicative, public activity are two critical aspects of what writing
instructors value about online writing.
This real, communicative, public function of student writing in
internetworked spaces revolutionizes Composition and holds out
promises for practitioners that writing will be removed from the
skill-and-drill and current-traditional approaches to writing in-
struction. Yet this same liberatory quality can confound the use of
traditional writing assessment models to evaluate student growth
and development in the writing classroom. This latter point becomes
a thorny issue for K-20 writing teachers, as federal and state legisla-
tive demands for accountability push us to ensure that certain basic
writing standards are being met in the classroom. As many English
education specialists, education theorists, composition researchers,
and K-12 teachers will suggest, these political expectations for leav-
ing no child behind frequently reconstruct writing classroom set-
tings that return teaching to the spoon feeding of information so
students can pass minimally challenging state writing exams (Apple,
2001, 2003; Hillocks, 2002).
Computer-assisted writing pedagogy offers the potential to break
students' "banking concept of education" (1993, p. 53) so familiar in
Freire' s readings and so commonly found in a majority of writing as-
sessment systems. In public, networked spaces, students learn that
others beyond the teacher's voice can authenticate their words and
imbue the students' words with meaning. For experienced or com-
fortable writers, this can be a liberating moment in the classroom.
However, for students at ease with the banking concept of education
in the writing classroom, the freedom can be unnerving — if not
downright confusing. After all, if students are saturated with a