Page 97 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

Chapter 3

Who Owns
the Words in Electronic Texts?

New media technology changes so quickly—and all too often, both
culturally and economically, colleges and faculty lag behind. Even if
writing instructors were raised in the television or video culture,
making the leap to multimedia communication is sometimes diffi-
cult. The cognitive processes needed to encode and decode the layers
of messaging at times border on information overload for
compositionists who are tied closely to the printed page. The cultural
and economic lag also extends to institutions facing the constant
hardware and software upgrades needed to keep pace with the ad-
vances in a computer's internal architecture. Without continual
proper training of faculty and regular upgrades and maintenance of
machines, a computer-based writing environment quickly can be
rendered obsolete.
Yet our classrooms are filled with students who move easily though
web pages and weblogs filled with Shockwave or MP3 audio, Quick
Time video, hyperlinks, and Flash applets. Students are comfortable
adapting to the cutting edge of technological advances because they
are steeped in this culture. From cell phones to pagers to laptop com-
puters with DVD burners and portable DVD players, most of our stu-
dents have a technological awareness that stretches to their language
use as well. They not only want to read information in this newer
technological manner, but they also want to write and produce infor-
mation the same way.
Literacy for these students is not confined to traditional alphabetic
or belletristic forms. Students increasingly realize that literacy is
now a convergence of information from a variety of sources, both
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