Page 48 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

INTERNETWORKED WRITING 15

match—the learning goals of the outcome test do not mesh with the
critical skills needed to generate electronic texts. Worse yet, there is
no consistent model to use to assess the students' work.
Even if writing faculties align the curriculum to include some
e-texts, assessing them raises questions of efficiency. The process-
ing time for an instructor to evaluate a range of electronic texts
can be enormous—how would an instructor be compensated for
the additional hours needed to review this work? Although we can
look to portfolio assessment, where the same question has been
asked and not easily resolved in many places, the number and va-
riety of electronic texts produced in a given semester just by one
student can be enormous. Multiply this by 60 or 80 students in
the three or four sections of composition a college instructor
might teach, or the 125 students a high school teacher might
reach, and the answer seems to be just to chuck the whole idea of
integrating electronic writing assignments. At the end of a mark-
ing period, when grades are due and rapid feedback is necessary,
who wants to shuffle more files—electronic or paper—than is ab-
solutely needed?
The problem is that society and our students are devouring tech-
nology. As our culture becomes increasingly more information-de-
pendent, students' futures depend on their facility with tech-
nology. It would be wrongheaded for Composition to retain
19th-century writing models and early 20th-century assessment
plans in light of the rapid changes in writing and communication
occurring in the world. As a field and as individual practitioners, we
must incorporate more networked writing experiences into the
curriculum. As networked writing becomes a greater part of the
Composition curriculum, it becomes increasingly more important
to have an assessment mechanism in place that measures students'
work in this new medium. Otherwise, measuring students' writing
is untenable, because part of the students' skill in writing is work-
ing with the medium. Therefore, it is time to reinvent Composition
to account for the convergence between technology and assessment
in the writing curriculum.
Can reinventing Composition solve the problems of poor student
placement in our classes, the issues of the digital divide that separate
students from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, and
the rising concerns of student cheating and academic dishonesty,
along with nearly 100 other local issues that plague writing pro-