Page 96 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

TRANSFORMING TEXTS 63

• Students will come to know how to evaluate an electronic text
effectively, fairly, and efficiently through their interactions
with other writers and thinkers (adapted from Hopkins, 1998).

So, yes, it is possible and desirable for compositionists and their
programs to develop a community of writers to address writing as-
sessment in an age of technological convergence. Not only will this
action encourage keeping a human's touch on two potentially dis-
tancing technologies, a point that is often raised to counter the use of
computers in the writing classroom, but it will also open student
writers to multiple, public audiences who can engage students with
new views and opportunities for reader response. The result of this
community building can be an assessment mechanism that is both
truly authentic and can address the problem of the mundane text in
the writing class.
In the electronic transformation of what compositionists know as
the text, the door is left open to transform what the culture of Com-
position knows as writing assessment. Many mundane e-texts con-
form to the ludic facets of postmodernism as they transcend
historical time and space, draw on free-floating signifiers, and shat-
ter the production of linear connections. Yet mundane e-texts can
also maintain a resistant strain of postmodernism in that they break
apart the traditional power structures and reconfigure power,
knowledge, and motives more evenhandedly compared with the tra-
ditional texts that instructors study during their graduate and post
graduate years. As writing programs are pressured to include more
internetworked writing assignments and more faculty discover the
divergent qualities of paper and pixelized texts, the e-texts' failure to
submit to traditional writing assessment practices will cause
compositionists to question the time-honored understandings of as-
sessment. It is this latter tension that e-texts place on writing assess-
ment that Composition and compositionists must focus on as
electronic literacy becomes more pervasive in society. This tension
that the e-text puts on assessment will lead us to newer, fairer, more
authentic ways to evaluate our students' writing.