Reading response 2b

Challenges for Writing Teachers: Evolving Technologies and Standardized Assessment

Herrington & Moran

Following on from Richardson’s fourth chapter on wikis, its kind of interesting that my response to this article should directly address comments made in my previous posting.

In my last posting I questioned the future of printed books because they didn’t have embedded hyperlinks: Herrington and Moran launch right into how this kind of deficit is killing print media with the New York Times itself asking how long it will continue to exist.

Since this article was published the words blogging and texting no longer appear with “squiggly red lines” underneath them, at least not in my word processor, and when I type something like http://www.google.com my software automatically converts that particular text into a hyperlink, which shows that progress is being made. My words are almost ready to fly into the internether, the nether regions of cyberspace, as I type them. With a few clicks this text could be posted online on my blog or in my wiki somewhere. So technology is starting to become seamless with word processing. Things like Google docs (no red lines) could instantly allow me to share and build intertexts and as such technology becomes more prevalent then such connectivity might become the default mode of composition.

But as this article describes, the constraints of classroom assessment are barrier to true integration of media across the digital spectrum. Technology is still not utilized as a tool of writers and writing classrooms because of the backward, formulaic assessment pedagogy. (I was edified to look back over one of my top-scoring exam essays from 1989 and see that my A came from a six, not five, paragraph essay: phew! I dodged a bullet there!)

Calls for technology to be so utilized, as the tool for writers and in writing instruction, speaks directly to blogs and wikis and other collaborative digital writing processes, a tool for writing which already, because of word processing, can “seem always unfinished, always awaiting closure.” The temptation to fiddle or constantly mess with and edit texts is perhaps inevitable, particularly once writing moves onto shared platforms, and the potential loss of a finite art is a concern. Perhaps the place of print media will never completely disappear, especially in this age when a company like Amazon can reach out over WiFi and edit texts en masse after they have already been purchased on the Kindle. The next step is for an author to not only publish electronically but to compose over WiFi, updating installments, responding to the audience as well as his own whim, in a manner not so far removed from Dickens’ serialized installments of his novels, composed from week to week. An interesting idea.

Obviously, classroom and writing assessment has to bend. How it will, whether it will are questions still to be resolved, and it is with these questions hanging in the air, waiting to be downloaded and commented on and blogged and shared and brought to consensus, that I leave this reading. Perhaps the writing teacher is also a potential source of social change too.