Page 112 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

WHO OWNS THE WORDS? 79

skills and strategies drawn from professionally written models. The re-
sult of this approach is students creating a "bag of tricks" they can dip
into at will to construct a paper on demand. In this system, student
writers are not considered to be "real" writers. They are apprentices
learning the craft. Students do not own their work; they merely repli-
cate what has been shown before. Proficiency is marked by how well
student writers emulate the professionals and not by how well the stu-
dents plan an original approach, organize it, negotiate the interplay be-
tween language and ideas, and revise. The difficulty with this
pedagogical approach is not only its timeworn quality in light of the
numerous advances in collaborative and constructlvist teaching styles;
it is also the problem that few professional models of hypertextual
writing or other networked writing exist. Most online examples are
created by nonprofessional writers or by folks who think of writing as
an avocation or a way to communicate ideas with like-minded others.
In short, most internetworked writing is produced by writers who are
very much like our students. Students soon ascertain that they are just
as proficient as the writers they emulate in networked space, and it be-
comes very easy for students to dismiss any instructor's evaluation of
their work if the critique does not match the context in which the
e-texts are produced.
For those instructors who value inventiveness and self-reliance in a
writer's decision making more than the correctness of form, the issue
of students owning their texts (electronic or paper) tends to be less a
pedagogical concern. These teachers seem to have more an apprehen-
sion regarding how to evaluate a work that regularly resists current
alphabetically literate understandings of what defines good writing.
They understand that the definition of good writing varies, but the
motives underlying what makes good writing reflect similar goals.
Many of these compositionists look for patterns of risk that show a
student writer's growth, watch for changes in the multiple literacies
found in their students' networked writing that indicate develop-
ment, and rely on classroom reflection to define how change occurs in
each student writer as well as in their own teaching practices. In the
face of mounting institutional pressure to devise quantifiable learning
outcomes for their classes, however, these instructors are not always
certain whether traditional assessment procedures are compatible
with writing in a networked environment. More likely, these teachers
find present assessment methods to be completely in opposition to the
student writing development occurring in their computer-based