Page 86 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

TRANSFORMING TEXTS 53

• Shows that students are acquainted with and can perform spe-
cific technological applications and processes to transmit infor-
mation to a variety of familiar and unfamiliar online audiences
(adapted from Dupuis, 1997)

Readers should notice that the words competence, skill, product,
and other like terms reflective of earlier assessment procedures are
absent from this model. In place of these older notions, a greater em-
phasis is placed on communication and community, interactive and
multiple discourse situations and formats, and the process of writ-
ing in and for networked contexts.
This is an important shift in how compositionists define writing
assessment for two central reasons. First, instead of approaching the
act of assessing writing as being primarily an exploration into the
deficiencies in student writing, this reconfigured assessment philos-
ophy accounts for writers' assets and what knowledge students ac-
quire over a term. The outcomes in a rubric are asking writing
teachers not just to measure skill development but also to consider
the students' range of awareness about the roles of various techno-
logical resources and options and how those might function to re-
solve a writer's problems when composing for a networked
audience. Second, radicalizing the language of assessment by elimi-
nating traditional terminology asks writing instructors to
reconceptualize evaluation instruments as being a creative force in-
stead of a norming force. The significance of this second point should
not go unnoticed in many higher educational settings, where our di-
verse student populations lean toward literacies that are underval-
ued by standard norming assessment procedures. This trend will
continue to occur in the years ahead, as more students from wider
social and racial spectra enter American colleges and universities. In-
stead of reinforcing the "right" way of thinking about online writing
to students (whatever criteria the right way may follow), the em-
phasis in evaluation becomes less a matter of correctness and more a
dialogue between students and instructors about the text based on
applicable evidence that emerges from the e-text.
An assessment philosophy for networked writing like the one pro-
posed here works with students' multiple literacies without punish-
ing students for being less inclined to favor an institutionally
dominant literacy. So students who are strongly visually literate or
aurally literate and who are weaker in alphabetic literacy can dis-
cover innovative ways to write and communicate that incorporate