Page 101 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

68 CHAPTER 3

"personalism" in a classroom context, however, could bring forth
trouble as plagiarism.
Lately, more of these academic perceptions of the Internet's
personalism are being challenged legally, as "fair use" for educa-
tional purposes concerning cybermaterial drawn from online
newspaper and magazine web sites is more strictly defined. Fair
use issues and the Internet also extend to online class lectures that
are derived extensively from another author's work—these lec-
tures, unless password protected, are subject to "cease and desist"
letters or threats of lawsuit (L. Marcus, personal communication,
July 1996; Tyner, 1997, p. 84). Students too are prepared to chal-
lenge in the courts an instructor's right to the fair use of a stu-
dent's work for a class with online components. A 1998 suit
involving the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a former UNL
student showed that students can file suit against instructors who
place their work online without express permission. As a story in
the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, a student who believes
copyright is violated by uploading his or her work may bring legal
charges against the professor and the institution ("Former U of
Nebraska Student," 1998, A29).
This question of authority is central to both computer-enhanced
composition and writing assessment. In each instance, authority is
configured much differently. Internetworked writing environments
yield full authority to students—including the right not to have their
work displayed for public view or the right to password protect their
sites from unwanted entry. Following current understandings of in-
tellectual property rights, even in networked classrooms students
have the right—and the means—to deny public access to their work.
After all, having worldwide access to a student's paper—whether
flawed or perfect—is not quite the same as having a transparency of
the paper on an overhead in a F2F class setting for a limited number
of students to see. Teachers who view student resistance to up-
loading their papers onto the Internet as trivial should think about
the notion of "author's reprint rights," because internetworked
writing does carry copyright.
This type of student resistance can be problematic to the point of
lawsuit for those instructors who upload student assignments for
discussion or evaluation without first seeking their students' per-
mission ("Former U of Nebraska Student, "1998). The democratizing
effect of computer-enhanced composition that gives students