Page 166 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

HOT AMD COOL TECHNOLOGIES 133

students mastered certain tasks or relied heavily on the kindness of
others who had already acquired important techniques or strate-
gies in visual rhetoric or electronic communication. Including ar-
chival data in the assessment also helps build reflective teaching
practices, because instructors can trace whether a project had merit
for the students.
Over the last few years, I have come to realize how assessment
technology must change to accommodate this newer computer
technology in the writing classroom. Instead of discovering ways of
capturing students' curiosity to begin writing with computers, as I
had to 5 or 10 years ago, now my emphasis is on motivating stu-
dents' concerns for what is at stake when they create a web site, post
certain types of e-mail messages, or construct a hypertext story or
poem. This shift in my focus has not always been easy to make, but I
believe it has made me a better teacher of writing.

HOT AND COOL TECHNOLOGIES CONVERGE
IN THE WRITING FROM ROOM 25

Room 25 can be a colorful and active place. The classroom pace runs
from silent tapping of keys to the frenetic sounds of students on
deadline, depending on the time of the semester and the pressures of
looming assignments. Although each of my classes spend some time
throughout the semester in Room 25, the classes I teach completely
computer enhanced are my undergraduate Writing, Research, and
Technology class, and my graduate-level Writing for Electronic
Communities and Information Architecture classes. These three
classes are the ones that taught me more about what it means to
question writing assessment in the age of technological convergence.
Each of these classes made me realize that writing assessment is fre-
quently a teacher-referenced experience even though it is couched in
the language of student-centeredness. The instructor always under-
goes performance assessment in a writing class; the students' collec-
tive ability to react competently under specific conditions measures
the instructor's performance.
In Room 25, though, the group dynamic changes to something al-
most Zen-like. Even though I am still the instructor of record, the
professor, the students make the courses their own. I am teaching,
but I am not teaching. I am assessing, but I am not assessing. As stu-
dents work with various programs and texts, the class begins to