Page 149 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

Chapter 5

Hot and Cool Technologies
in the Age of Convergence:

Assessing the Writing in Room 25

Room 25 houses one of my department's writing labs. Some semes-
ters I spend an incredible amount of time there, teaching classes like
Writing for Electronic Communities, Writing, Research, and Tech-
nology, and Information Architecture. Other semesters, the students
in my College Composition II classes spend hours in the lab or else-
where, logging in and writing online.
There are days when I spend hours working with many stu-
dents who have multiple levels of technophobia as well as with
many students who are writing averse (sometimes the two
groups overlap). From those moments, my thinking about the use
of technology in the writing classroom has evolved. When I fin-
ished graduate school more than a decade ago, the technologies
connected to writing assessment seemed to be cold and distant, a
sure-fire way to alienate students in the composition classroom.
Computer technologies, though, were "hot." In the late 1980s and
early 1990s, those boxes of lights and wires and networks sitting
in a writing lab were exciting enough to bring the most resistant
student writer to class. Those days clearly are over. With wireless
technology, with online classes, with increasingly mandated as-
sessment plans, resistant writers have many ways to duck out of a
writing class—even the required writing classes. Still, the
McLuhanesque idea of "hot" and "cool" technologies intrigued me
and made me wonder about how computers and assessment re-
lated to what was happening in my classroom.
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