Page 156 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

HOT AND COOL TECHNOLOGIES 123

computer technology. Learning how to square the dual rhetorical
strains of corporatism and democratization that run through tech-
nological convergence is a challenge to even the most self-aware,
critically reflective instructor. I know this challenge happened to
me more times than not in the last half decade. Many times I catch
myself observing my classes and thinking of the Internet as "the fa-
miliar encrustation of images that accompanies any holy war,
whether mandala, marriage of heaven and hell, World Wrestling
Federation, religious icon, American Gladiators, or the matching
bibs and banners of the medieval Crusaders" (Joyce, 2001, p. 57).
As I watch my students compose online in web formats, I wonder
how much of this writing is democratic and how much of it is
corporatism run amok. Even though we study electronic civil dis-
obedience movements, critiques of cybersociety, and the like in my
classes, I find myself raising this question: Is it possible for teachers
in a technological environment to separate out the democracy from
the nationalism and the corporatism that exist in cyberspace? I
have yet to come up with an answer for this, but it is a question
that vexes me each time I teach in internetworked spaces.
The results of my trials and errors over the last 6 years have
helped me form the following considerations for initiating trans-
formative learning and assessment through the use of computer-en-
hanced composition. I offer them here as a way to consider new
avenues for redefining literacy in the 21st century:

• Online communication facilitates a sense of community among
students faster than most F2F classroom or teacher-initiated ac-
tivities.
• Computer-enhanced writing instruction is purely holistic in
the best sense of the word. Process is equal to product in the
teaching of writing in networked spaces, and students' minds
and bodies are engaged in solving the problems that arise in the
action of communication. Students can also incorporate all
their lived experiences and choices in their writing.
• In networked classrooms, information is shared across termi-
nals and across the globe rather than across a teacher's desk.
• Learning and writing in a networked classroom space make
students more aware of the disparity in racial, gender, sexual-
ity, and economic issues in society than does discussing these
concerns in a traditional classroom environment.