Green Squiggly Lines:

Abstract

Abstract: A electronic publishing means that & roles blur into something new. Yet, institutions of higher education continue to evaluate and assess student writing within print-based models of communicative compentence. "Green Squiggly Lines" the difficulties and adaptations faced as writing (and writing assessment) become electronic. When electronic publication comes into the college writing classroom in the form of electronic portfolios what happens?

We have a theory, a trace, a prediction of what will happen in the influence that word processors have had on student writing. By outlining a history of word processors in writing pedagogy and assessment (a vast increase in studies of and pedagogies advocating revision occurred in the 1980s), "Green Squiglly Lines" sketches the potential impact of electronic portfolios on writing assessment. How will the publication--the turning of academic essays into (pre)professional documents [literally portfolios in the graphic artist sense of the word]--change writing assessment in American higher education?

Predictions--a.k.a. Toffler 3rd wavisms--are tricky, vague, and subject to error. Yet, the trends are (t)here. Although much of this web draws on the history of electronic publication through the influence of word processors, it is the not quite fully realized possibilities of electronic portfolios that should draw us forward. Like those pixelated video faces in Myst, writing assessment and electronic publication are not, quite, in focus The challenge of finding that focus requires new methods of reading--and new methods of research--and "Green Squiggly Lines" tries to sketch out these possibilities...

against the historical echo, the green glow from a monochrome screen... the old word processor hums along not yet knowing that its green would soon diminish into the green squiggly line... in MSWord written below every sentence fragment and driving every student writer onward into revision, into writing something else, almost what they wanted to say...