Page 25 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

xxii INTRODUCTION

Guenther Kress saliently observed that although many think of
technology as an "independently active agent in social affairs"
(1999, p. 83), a message infused throughout society by the media
and industry, any technology-dependent context—including writ-
ing classrooms—clearly requires particular social conditions for
technologies to be adopted and to take hold in a culture. As a subset
of literacy, writing is quite subject to changes in cultural or social
conditions and can be thought of as a technological form, especially
when it is compared with orality. Writing transformed Western
culture's ways of making meaning, because it became the method
of making meaning permanent. Similarly, assessment tools and
Harvard's English A writing course were enacted to respond to spe-
cific social conditions in the late 1800s that demanded hierarchies
exist in the workplace, in education, and in societal relations. Some
device was needed to ensure a "professionalized" education to sepa-
rate the managerial class from the aspiring working class. Thus,
assessment mechanisms—a form of technology created to generate
some meaning about student writing and to guarantee a measure
of cultural reproduction—were put in place. For almost a century,
this system worked well to make permanent certain notions about
student writing because technological and social conditions stayed
relatively stable. In the 1980s, with a third wave of technology en-
tering American life through the computer chip, a dramatic shift
occurred in the technological and social conditions connected to
American writing instruction: Electronic or networked writing
emerged. Kress, like Saffo, suggested that the shift from print liter-
acy to visuality—with its remaking of linguistic rules, authorship,
readership, publication, and scholarship—reflected a different set
of cultural conditions that parallel the globalization, social distanc-
ing, and expansion of communication in American society (Kress,
1995, 1999; Saffo, 1992). Today, writing instructors realize that
technology, assessment, and literacy are not separate from social
conditions; rather, all are directly influenced by the swiftness of so-
cietal development and the pressures from varying social and polit-
ical institutions.
Composition specialists need to be acutely aware of what we teach
when we layer multiple technologies in the classroom, because
Kress' observation reflects one of the potential common points in the
convergence between networked writing and assessment: the pace of
technological change. Generally, the rate of technological change in