Page 87 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of New Media On

56 CHAPTER 2

1. Students examine a social problem in real life that has similar
effects in virtual communities (i.e., illiteracy, addiction, rape,
freedom of religion, privacy rights, hate speech, racism, sexual
discrimination).
2. Students investigate many web sites, electronic discussion lists,
Usenet groups, chat rooms, or MOOs to evaluate the ways lan-
guage, image, sound, and color affect homogenous and hetero-
genous audiences based on race, class, gender, political
affiliation, physical ability, geographic region, or age.
3. Students participate in various electronic discussion formats
outside of the classroom experience to discern how well the writ-
ten text substitutes for spoken language and how audiences
(mis)interpret concrete and abstract words in the textual mes-
sages they receive.

Second, students exhibit that online writing is a constructive
process that depends on a writer making certain choices and selec-
tions or changing specific elements of the text or image to control
the message sent to the reader. The following individual criteria
are used to measure this goal:

1. Students create their own discourse rules to maintain and mod-
erate their class discussion list.
2. Students create external discussion lists or blogs using freeware
on a topic of interest and solicit members to join and stay with
the list or blog. Students choose to create moderated or
unmoderated lists and must select avenues for broadcasting the
existence of their lists or blogs.
3. Students write in various mediums (hypertext and HTML, spe-
cifically) and incorporate graphics, sound, and motion in their
nonfiction and fiction writing to test the effectiveness of incorpo-
rating different media elements in an e-text and to discover
which media each student prefers for writing. Also, students dis-
cover that some genres react differently to a change in techno-
logical medium, which causes multiple reactions in an audience.

Third, students rely on multiple forms or genres of electronic
communication to produce a range of teacher-assigned and self-se-
lected projects. The following individual criteria are used to mea-
sure this goal: