Page 66 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

TRANSFORMING TEXTS 33

text and textual production. Now, though, writing instructors need
to explore how these transformations in the text can be assessed if
they are to respond with any type of authority to institutional and
student demands. External oppositional voices—and some internal
antagonistic voices as well—are able to dismiss any curricular inno-
vation like technological convergence or even Composition itself if
there is a lack of correspondence between the stated course goals or
standards and the ability to measure the students' capability for
meeting them. The computer decentralizes the teacher's classroom
authority and redistributes it throughout a roomful of writers,
thereby removing much of the traditional writing teacher's direct
intervention in the overall evaluation of students' writing. That is
why greater efforts need to be made to demonstrate to the naysayers
that course goals, standards, and outcomes can and do exist for these
new textual forms. Mechanisms need to be in place to show adminis-
trators, faculty, and students that e-texts can be appraised in some
way and can show student growth in writing.
As more writing programs and their professors enter the brave
new world of program assessment at the same time that campus ad-
ministrators and accreditation groups are encouraging greater use
of technology in composition classes, the integration of writing as-
sessment and computer technology has to be examined carefully. All
of us have to ask ourselves whether writing instructors can evaluate
written work that is completely "owned" by the students, especially
if the entire class develops into its own literate learning community
and so understands the language, the contexts, and the adaptability
of the discourse to communicate with others. Or, is Composition
such the example that classroom-generated writing—especially in
assessment contexts—will never be fully "owned" by student writers
and will always have, to varying degrees, the teacher overriding or
overwriting the final submission?
Textual ownership is a central and sensitive issue in computer-
based writing assessment, because students who upload any elec-
tronic texts to the Internet are publishing authors and share the
same rights and privileges to their written work that their professors
do. Just as many writing teachers bristle at moderated listowners
who assess and overwrite submitted posts before distributing them
to the audience, student writers involved in networked writing
spaces find themselves equally piqued when writing teachers engage
in these practices. If writing instructors are teaching students how