Ms. Scarbary’s class

Jackie brings up a good point in the comments to my previous post about standardized testing. Standardized tests are unlikely to go away, for it IS true that some standard sort of yardstick is needed to accurately assess knowledge and ability. We all took the SAT to get into college, and took the GRE to be accepted to the graduate program. Frankly, an A at one school isn’t equal to an A elsewhere. Some schools are better than others, and we do need some form of accountability and some, however limited and questionable, quantitative measures of comparison.

But while those SATs and GREs were certainly “high stakes”, test scores alone do not determine whether or not a student will be accepted into college. College admission boards rightly look at grades, extra curricular activities, essays, and letters of recommendation when making these types of decisions. Unfortunately, our public schools no longer are. A single CRCT score can and will prevent a student from promotion to the next grade.  SATs and GREs can be retaken, and are weighted against other criteria, but these live or die tests are really a problem for me.

 Translating print texts into digital format also alters the ways they transmit meaning and the ways in which they are accessed. -Janet Swenson, Carl A. Young, Ewa McGrail, Robert Rozema, and Phyllis Whitin 

This is a really interesting concept for me. As someone who has lived her life ONLINE for the past 11 years, gathering information from the internet is a transparent action for me. What I have never before considered, however, is how these digital texts alter my comprehension and my learning in different ways than the same text in a printed form. As the authors state, hyperlinking, imbedded image and video, and varying graphical arrangements have the ability to completely alter the way I read and make meaning. I am allowed to follow my own “personal, meaning-driven process,” jumping off the lead text midstream, into biographical information or suggested readings. How is reading an AP article online different from reading the same article in my morning newspaper? Reading the article about Rumsfeld stepping down as Secretary of Defense through the “Yahoo Top Story” rank in my email inbox, I have access to an imbedded slide show of his photos. I have direct hyperlinks to the Pentagon’s website and Sen. Carl Levin’s voting record. While this enriched text likely allows for more significant processing, I am fully aware that I am still at the mercy of what pieces of information the web designers and linking editors consider important pieces of information.
These acts call into question the importance of not only the author’s intent, but that of the web designer, graphic artist, web editor…. As ELA teachers, when using these newer internet sources, we must now consider not only the texts we are presenting, but the web contexts in which we situate those texts. This is potentially a whole new area of literary theory, for the meaning we make as readers exists not just in the transaction between the reader, text, and world, but includes the transactions between all the auxiliary texts linked to the prime text.