Green Squiggly Lines:

Giving Up "'Uneducated' Ways To Become Scholars Like Us"

To reinvigorate the computer-mediated writing classroom, we must also take risks, we must open the grading, evaluation and assessment of essays up to democratic participation. While Cooper and Selfe (1990) and Shor (1996) invoke the authoritarian teacher as part of the status quo's hegemony over classroom practices, writing teachers have-in fact-been working on redesigning the composition classroom and on making the composition classroom into a different, more effective, non-traditional learning space since the publication of Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer Research into Written Composition (1963).

Still the formal systems for evaluating student work, particularly in electronic environments, tend to center on standards, or at least rubrics, created by teachers or administrators rather than negotiated among students, instructors, and institutions. Shor's work points toward a radical challenge for developers of electronic portfolios--use the electronic publication's ability to have different navigational schemes as a means of meeting institutional demands and allowing students the flexibility to present their work within rubrics of their own design. Can the designs of electronic portfolios as developed at Kalamazoo College, Alverno College, and the University of Texas be adapted for use in a course where the curriculum and the methods of assessment are negotiated?