An embarrassment of riches. A forbidding challenge. An unparalleled opportunity. An overwhelming task. Depending on one's point of view, any--or all--these phrases describe the enterprise of teaching writing in the Age of Interaction. Once upon a time, we writing teachers could discharge our responsibilities by preparing students to fare well in a print culture. We could teach them to produce better text-on-paper. Today, we face a dizzying array of texts. We are awash in media: hypertext, e-mail, web pages, hypermedia, MOOtexts (MOOs themselves, even). Our graduates, we know, will write in all these media--and more--so we must find ways to help them, while they are still our students, grow into ever more versatile writers--into makers, poets in the Aristotelian sense. Furthermore, the agorae, the marketplaces in which our students will write, have diversified. The rhetoric of the page, as different as one page could be from another, was still finite, still seemingly knowable and manageable. The rhetorics of the screen, however, seem often bewilderingly different.

The rhetoric of e-mail--one kind of rhetoric of the screenful--grows out of the apparent sameness of that screen. All e-mail messages look alike, though as we grow more expert in this medium, we see the subtle differences that separate the novice's text from the e-rhetor's. By contrast, the rhetoric of the Web--also screen-based--stems from the fact that each Web page seems different, yet at their base, they resemble each other more than they differ. In e-mail, we encourage terseness; we even encourage cliches (for example, the emoticon), since in this medium the familiar, the reliable, helps make the writer's intentions clearer, less mistakable. In Websites, though, triteness remains negative. Here we reward the new, the creative, the ingenious. While we still base rhetoric on the screenful, this screen needs to be full of eye-catching, innovative, multimedia communication. If we could write an e-mail message in the same way we write a Webpage, we would not, for to do so would guarantee miscommunication, would guarantee that we would violate our readers' expectations of the form. To write a Webpage by the same rhetoric we use for e-mail would be to invite ridicule--the writer's clear amateurishness would destroy the writer's ethos. No one would pay attention to such a text, such a naive writer.

If the challenge of teaching in the age of interaction is great, the challenge of evaluation is even greater. How do we move from the relatively simple--but still dauntingly complex--task of evaluating text on paper to the task of evaluating the performances of students who have produced so many kinds of text, and so very much text? Oddly enough, the answer may lie in what often seems an uncomfortable consequence of the computer-assisted teaching of writing: the loss of control most teachers experience as students (a) direct their attention to the screen and to each other, rather than to the teacher and (b) produce far more text than the teacher can possibly read. Once upon a time, teachers controlled the texts their students produced. Teachers read all those texts. Teachers graded the texts and averaged the grades. Our students still produce traditional kinds of writing, of course, but they also participate in the class's e-mail list; they create websites; they contribute to synchronous and asynchronous conversations; they write collaboratively; they navigate a language-rich classroom, becoming multi-talented, multi-faceted writers and makers.

Just as many traditional ways of teaching and learning fail in the face of new technologies, so traditional methods of grading also fall short. When students performed under a narrow set of constraints, their performance could be described narrowly. Remove the constraints--and in this we have no choice; the constraints are off, whether we acknowledge the fact or not--and a student's performance requires a more flexible form of evaluation. Performance assessment (of which portfolios are the most prominent example) allows students to construct themselves for us. We need to allow students to pick and choose from the corpus of their work, to collect samples of their achievements for us, and to describe the breadth and quality of those achievements. We need to put a large measure of control over evaluation into the hands of students, to give them a voice in high-stakes decisions about their own evaluations. By so doing, we not only take the pressure off ourselves, but we put a powerful new motivation for learning into our students' hands. In effect, we acknowledge that students are learners, rather than receptacles for our received wisdom.

Putting a large measure of control into learners' hands accommodates the new spaces--cyberspace, gopherspace, Webspace, e-space, etc.--in which students perform; it also accommodates the increased volume and variety of text learners can produce in a computer-equipped classroom setting. A crucial factor in the challenges new technologies present is the sheer range of performance that is now possible in a "writing" class. Each of these spaces amounts to a new agora for the rhetor, a new performance space with its own set of rules, its own rhetoric. Each of these performance spaces brings new complications to the enterprises of teaching, learning, and evaluating. As we embrace these new media, these new marketplaces, we also embrace the notion of text as performance. Performance assessments, in this new setting, can help us turn a forbidding challenge into an unparalleled opportunity, an overwhelming task into an embarrassment of riches.