While there are exceptions (particularly if you look at the work of compositionists with interests in computers and writing), the message regarding the nature of writing at all levels of education is clear: It is a solo effort. Teachers close their classroom doors and teach as they always have: privileging individual effort. Co-teaching and collaborative projects are the exception, not the norm.

We need look no further than the standardized tests that determine how swiftly a student will move from one level to the next. These types of tests are prevalent during the formative years of one's primary education. The same type of testing continues through high school, culminating in perhaps the most important test of all, the SAT, which can have a major influence on whether a student can gain

acceptance into a 4-year university. And now, thanks to U.S. Department of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, we can anticipate similar tests in higher education. For instance, the Florida Board of Governors has made clear its intention to incorporate standardized assessment at the university level. While the pejorative "college FCAT" isn't, perhaps, the best way to describe it (students would be evaluated through tests, essays, portfolios and interviews) such a program clearly favors individual effort and shuns collaboration. And while the credibility of standardized writing exams have repeatedly been called into question, college graduates looking to pursue graduate or professional degrees must endure one last standardized exam in the GRE, which contains a written portion.

Clearly, society (and its educational systems) reinforces the solitary writer as the prototype, yet outside of Composition, outside of academia, communities are exploring new ways to collaborate and construct knowledge in truly revolutionary ways. The realization of collaborative theory has been made possible largely by increasing connectivity to the Internet around the world.

As access to the World Wide Web increases, so does the "conversation."