Page 85 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

52 CHAPTER 2

between visual and textual rhetoric because those texts speak to
wider audiences and demand that writers and readers use a range of
literacies to comprehend the information contained within them.
As students become comfortable with using both mundane texts
and multiple literacies in networked environments, compositionists
can also count on students becoming even more aware of how texts
are read by others. A result of this evolution in evaluation becomes
real student ownership of the text. Student writers truly come to ac-
cept responsibility for putting colored marks on a blank screen and
do not merely replicate what they see their instructors modeling for
them in the front of the room. At last, Composition's culture be-
comes genuinely democratic and progressive. Students and their in-
structors together share power with words instead of one having
power over another's words. Assessment becomes an extension of
dialogue among authors in a writing community instead of an
adversarial experience.
Is this possible? Is this Utopic thinking?
Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not.
What will make this proposed situation a reality in Composition's
culture is a radical reconception of what assessment is for the e-text.
Writing assessment needs to address the diversity found in e-texts
and the diversity of the electronic writing process. The type of writ-
ing assessment that composition studies should call for in an age of
technological convergence corresponds to the following six points:

• Acknowledges the complexities of the communication environ-
ment, the online writing process, and the technologies involved
in producing an interactive environment
• Perceives students who write in networked spaces to be pub-
lished authors and grants those students the same rights and
privileges as other writers in a scholarly environment
• Recognizes and articulates the multiple forms of information
needed across diverse communication situations
• Considers the students' ability to select applicable tools or
sources that conform to the discourse community (or commu-
nities) that students occupy
• Confirms students' capability to evaluate textual materials
across multiple mediums and formats
• Demonstrates students' awareness of and aptitude for manipu-
lating and organizing acquired information across multiple
media, formats, and computer operating system platforms