Page 163 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

130 CHAPTER 5

assessment trends correspond nicely to what the punditry support
and the public think measures good writing. Students' mechanical
skills are not necessarily in question with networked writing as they
are with pen-and-paper texts, as HTML writing requires strong syn-
tactic skills for a web page to load properly. The same goes for writ-
ing in MOOspace or in the blogosphere—poor syntax leads to an
inability to perform. Most instructors find that students whose
punctuation or spelling skills are weak have great difficulties with
even the simplest Internet search. This "problem" forces students to
check their work more carefully, enlist the help of others nearby
when something is not working correctly, or discuss their problems
running a search engine or HTML code with the instructor before
moving on to future activities. These are not necessarily bad things
in a collaborative writing classroom.
Equally important is that I learned many aspects of a hot technol-
ogy like assessment have possibilities for being incorporated into a
cool medium in the writing classroom. Rather than heating up the
assessment process, the coolness of the computer medium offers the
opportunity to account for the originality that students frequently
display in identifying the writing practices or strategies needed to
produce a response.
However, given the oppositional qualities of a hot technology like
assessment and a cool one like computers, finding practices that
work in one system as well as the other can be troublesome, espe-
cially in classroom situations where outcomes-based education is in-
stituted. Still, I learned that it is indeed possible to meld the two
technologies to create an assessment for adequacy. Although tradi-
tional assessment structures such as rigid rubrics regularly address
surface concerns, performance assessment tends to be a more in-
stinctive approach for the complex tasks and real audiences that ma-
terialize in a computer-enhanced classroom. In current practice,
though, many performance assessment contexts either are limited
in their scope or are too highly structured to be of much value in a
fluid environment like cyberspace. Extended performance assess-
ments, like writing instructors can find in the Online Learning Re-
cord or TOPIC/ICON, lean toward open, broadly defined, problem-
solving and communication-infused activities that occur in net-
worked writing. However, a significant difficulty with performance
assessment is that the current dominant perspective in educational
tests and measurements is to use performance assessment as a sup-
port for traditional methods (Gronlund, 1998) rather than a