Page 184 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

ACCESS BEFORE ASSESSMENT 151

ket-model university. Anne Herrington and Charles Moran (2001)
warned compositionists of the dangers ahead if a human presence is
lost in the convergence between computers and assessment. Writing,
whether in electronic or print forms, should never be considered
more than a mere demonstration of artful placement of words and
phrases. Writing is a communicative act, dependent on situations,
readers, and writers. At times, writing is efficient, but it can also be
ornate, foolish, playful, or abstruse. This is something writing spe-
cialists should recognize and remember, because the current soft-
ware evaluation tools do not. As Herrington and Moran (2001)
noted, a student's writing on the machine is far different from a stu-
dent's writing to the machine. If Composition's convergence is to be
a bold, new stage in its progression as a discipline, then instructors
need to discover ways on their campuses to take those first incre-
mental steps in ensuring genuine access to both technologies. To do
nothing virtually guarantees a return of the heat from indirect
assessment in the guise of cool technology.

CREATING ETHICAL ACCESS TO NETWORKED ENVIRONMENTS
FOR ESTABLISHING ETHICAL ASSESSMENT PRACTICES

In the access battle, writing specialists must also carve out ethical
spaces for networked environments in order to establish ethical as-
sessment practices. At the heart of establishing ethical access for as-
sessment procedures is whether instructors are teaching and
measuring something important in the curriculum. In general,
Composition as a discipline professes that for people to participate
fully in contemporary democratic societies, computer and informa-
tion literacy is almost mandatory. If this is so, in internetworked
writing classes, instructors need to consider the human relation-
ships that technology forms or shapes. For instance, how is power
constructed or shared in cyberclassrooms? Which courses get to use
the computers most often and why? How should the writing assign-
ments look in computer-enhanced classrooms? And, for the pur-
poses of this volume, what are the rules for electronic texts and how
do we measure them fairly?
These are important questions to ponder as Composition moves
deeper into its second decade of computer use and nears the second
century of writing assessment. For a growing number of institu-
tions, having technology available to the classroom is not in ques-