Page 62 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

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Chapter

Transforming Texts,
Transforming Assessment

A text and what student writers do with the production of a text are
always at the center of writing instruction and assessment, regard-
less of the medium used. Similarly, the preconceptions that writing
faculty maintain about what a text is and how it should look influ-
ence how student texts are received. Nowhere do these two ideas
emerge more clearly than when writing faculty engage in the assess-
ment of student-produced electronic texts. In her essay, "The Effect
of Hypertext of Processes of Reading and Writing," Davida Charney
(1994) observed that "our conception of text as an orderly succession
of ideas is strongly reinforced by the constraints of the standard
print medium: texts come to us on printed pages that we generally
read in order, from the top down and from left to right" (p. 238). The
order that most faculty members have come to know is changing,
however. As networked writing becomes more prevalent in the col-
lege composition classroom, the definition and nature of what a text
is and what writers can do with texts are shifting. We are no longer
bound to the constraints of the print medium. This point is impor-
tant as computers increasingly affect the teaching of writing and the
call to assess e-texts becomes greater.
Guenther Kress, in Page to Screen (in Snyder, 1998), pointed us to-
ward the direction writing is taking in internetworked environments
when he wrote: "With convergence of technologies (telephone, televi-
sion, radio, computer), competence in all modes of representation will
simply be assumed—even though what is assumed may not in fact be
available" (p. 57). Until that time in society when technological con-
vergence occurs to such a degree that all writers will have an assumed
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