Reponse Class 5 T/Th

7/15/2009
Class 5 Response
Betsy Gitelle
ENWR600
Prof. Melinda Knight

Response to Chapter 1, from Herrington, A., Hodgson, K., & Moran, C. (2009). Teaching the new writing: Technology, change, and assessment in the 21st-century classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."
— E.M. Forster, Howards End

The first chapter of Anne Herrington, Kevin Hodgson, And Charles Moran’s Teaching The New Writing: Technology, Change, And Assessment In The 21st-Century Classroom introduces a paradox of technology: while its tools have broadened and made elastic the ways our students write and communicate, they have narrowed and stunted the way writing is assessed in standardized ways. The worst scenario of all is the use of computers to assess students’ written work. Isn’t the point of writing to connect? How sad to feed sheets of student writing into a CPU for formulaic, primitive evaluation. Until our computers are our peers, emotionally, culturally, and intellectually, it seems to me inherently disrespectful to subject students’ writing to this form of automated assessment.

As the editors begin the inquiry into “how this broader conception of writing – and the skills it draws on – aligns, or does not align, with current standardized testing” (p. 3) I find myself asking these preliminary questions:

• How do we define assessment? (I know this is an ongoing exploration for the course.)
• How are different, and newly emerging, forms of writing categorized? Is there a standard scheme?
• Are there different forms of assessment to parallel the different forms of writing?
• Have tools of assessment typically lagged behind new literary forms?
• How has writing been assessed historically?
• How do other countries assess student writing?

I do not yet have answers, but here are some beginning resources.

• George Hillock’s 2002 research into different state assessments of writing.
• Diane Ravitch who has stated that we should have one national curriculum and one set of standard assessments.
• Last, Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong might point us in a direction to help separate wheat from chaff.

Finally, I suppose this all comes down to ratios. There are too many students for every teacher, so teachers want to minimize the effort it takes to assess student work. Assessments cannot be made on individual bases because of the sheer logistics and the suspicion of bias, so assessments need to be made on a macro level, and be objective and quantifiable. Perhaps self-evaluation and peer-evaluation are the only tools that will make sense for judging a student’s ability to think critically and compose in the years to come.

Here are some of the sites I looked at while I was thinking about the issues raised in this chapter.

Alphabet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Press/Yancey_final.pdf

Marshall McLuhan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Only Connect: E. M. Forster In An Age of Electronic Communication

Sherry Turkle

Teaching the new writing : technology, change, and assessment in the 21st-century classroom [University of Washington Libraries]

Technology Initiative - National Writing Project

Walter J. Ong - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia