Teaching, Learning, and Evaluating Writing in the Age of Interaction
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.