Page 42 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of New Media On

INTERNETWORKED WRITING 11

or her. This is not the case with online writing instruction. Silent stu-
dents — the lurkers — may be put at a disadvantage in cyberspace be-
cause their quietude could be misinterpreted as lack of interest.
Writing teachers must also consider a student's silence as being a
sign of mistrust of the online writing situation or of some other
communication breach just as it might be inexperience with
technology.
Because asynchronous writing assignments do not have students
in direct physical contact with instructors, it is important to con-
sider students' online silence as maintaining some substance. As
sociolinguist Adam Jaworski noted, silence does suggest that some
type of activity occurs (1993, p. 81). There may exist a formulaic ele-
ment to a student's use of silence in online discussions. For instance,
a student may remain silent because she has nothing of relevance to
add to the discussion at a particular point. Or a student could be si-
lent because his reading of the posts suggest that only old informa-
tion is being repeated, and he feels there is nothing more to say about
the topic. Jaworski (1993) also posited that there are some silences,
such as pauses, which mark an individual's underlying personality
characteristics and reflect that person's speech patterns. Thus, in-
structors cannot necessarily jump to conclusions with lurkers on a
class list, because their silence may be far more substantive than
frequent posters to the list.
Even chancier than the risks some students take in their re-
sponses is how a writing instructor evaluates an ongoing online
discussion. On the one hand, students are writing — generally pro-
ducing volumes of fluid and fluent text. They are using voice, tone,
rhetorical strategies and appeals, and all the techniques and iden-
tity markers that professors expect of students when writing expo-
sition or persuasion. And students are doing this without having
the instructor tell the class how to use these tools.
However, the context in which students prepare the writing is ex-
tremely different from classroom assignments, journal writing, or
most types of writing that teachers have come to expect. The stu-
dents' writing is immediate and not filtered, as it might be in a F2F
classroom, a journal entry, or a class assignment. Sometimes the me-
chanics, grammar, and spelling are a bit rough. Yet in a composition
course influenced by technological convergence, I would argue that
these students are often quite literate, especially if they are highly en-
gaged in the topic under discussion. So, how does one evaluate such