Page 41 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

8 CHAPTER 1

asynchronously we do not know how the writer looks. Most likely, we
do not want to know this information. We certainly do not know who
our audience is or what the members look like when we correspond
with others on discussion lists or at gaming sites.
However, instructors know that when students are sending us
e-mail in the wee hours, they are writing and thinking long after the
day's class is over. When students send their instructors postings
about something that occurs related to a class that was taken a year
or two ago (or more) and resonated with the student's experience in
the class, then teachers know that writing, thinking, and reflecting
remain part of that student's learning process.

NEW MEDIA/NEW RISKS FOR WRITERS AND THEIR INSTRUCTORS

As mentioned in the last section, instead of the corporeal aspects of
writing in the classroom (the physical acts of letter formation or
putting pen to paper, for instance), the mental features of commu-
nicating with others becomes highlighted when we shift to com-
puters. For certain student populations in our writing classes, the
celebration of the mental process over the body in composing is an
important shift. As Leigh Kobert, one of my graduate students who
also worked in the medical publishing field, pointed out in a post to
our class list in Writing for Electronic Communities, a graduate
writing class I teach, in the spring 1999 semester,

One of the early readings described "disembodied voices and
decontextualized points of view." However, I can think of a context in
which this disconnection is very welcome. As I believe I have said I work
with people with physical and learning disabilities. Some of the people I
talk to struggle just to get out a sentence. Rheingold touches on the
factor of people with disabilities, i.e., CMC [Computer Mediated Com-
munication] allows the to be treated as they have always wanted to be
"as thinkers and transmitters of ideas and feeling beings." It must be
incredibly freeing to experience a medium for once without the disabil-
ity being the first thing that everyone is aware of. There is at last a
chance to be judged outside the vessel of a limited body or
speech/hearing disabilities.
Leigh described an appealing situation for many reticent students,
especially for those with medical or physical conditions that hamper
face-to-face (F2F) communication. The celebration of the mind over