Page 92 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

TRANSFORMING TEXTS 59

in electronic communication and depends on students' understand-
ing of multiple literacies to correctly decipher the context.
Some may argue that students in traditional classroom settings
also adopt these multiliteracy roles to write their assignments.
My response to this is that in internetworked writing spaces, stu-
dents are not adopting the roles; instead of posing as the student
who would contact Biologist Z or Journalist Y, students writing
online are contacting biologists, journalists, and so on. To success-
fully communicate with various professionals, students need to
learn the language, the rhetorical and discursive styles, and the
basic knowledge necessary to hold conversations with those al-
ready in a specialty. In these electronic exchanges with profession-
als, students must discover how to become situationally literate
and adapt to the multimodal conditions that exist in inter-
networked writing experiences.
Thinking about using computers to teach writing in this way is
completely different from thinking about using computers to show
students how to word process documents or to import graphics
into a text. Word processing can easily correspond with more cur-
rent-traditional understandings of textual production and its em-
phasis on student writers producing a "correct" document
compared with writing with HTML, SGML, ASP, or Perl scripts. The
word-processing approach is also more subject to instructor domi-
nance over the text because there is a very curbed interchange of
ideas and information between student writer and master teacher.
The resulting papertext conforms to familiar textual structures in
ways that e-texts do not. As such, an instructor's use of the
word-processing approach makes it much easier for him or her to
impose more intrusive assessment on student work. This can occur
because the instructor knows how a course paper should look; no
one knows what an e-text should look like—not even the most ex-
perienced writing instructor.
It is this not knowing what an e-text officially looks like or
should have as its purpose that makes evaluating one so difficult.
Who can say what the subject matter's purpose is for an e-text? To
impart information, yes, but surely there is more than that at work
in most e-texts. One could argue that writers of electronic texts
need to know who their potential readers are and what their expec-
tations and beliefs are. This idea works well for classroom assign-
ments with a fixed audience, but the potential readership on the