You say tomato, I say to-mah-to

As we delve deeper into the high tech world of teaching writing, the obvious temptation for me is to continually compare the new with the old. The traditional classroom vs. the on-line environment. Face-to-face peer review vs. virtual peer review. The design of on-line documents vs. paper documents. The resulting question is always “which one is better?” (Better for our students, for ourselves, for the academy, etc.)

So I was struck by last week’s recommendation of Breuch to avoid comparisons of good/bad because they end up being fruitless in the search to determine which is better or worse. Instead she suggests asking critical questions about the differences. Keeping in mind that good advice, I was surprised to read Moran and Herrington this week asking us to take note of the differences between evaluating hypertexts and evaluating traditional papers. ‘We encourage you also to think about the nature of these hypertexts in relation to non-hypertext compositions. Reading hypertext with non-hypertext in mind… helps bring into relief our expectations for non-hypertext academic writing and some of the conventions and associated evaluation criteria that we take for granted” (253).

Their goal is to work toward establishing some sort of rubric for evaluating hypertexts, which is vital for the classroom. The nature of the technology beast is causing us to develop new criteria in evaluations. For instance, the use of graphics and links add dimensions that the traditional typewritten paper cannot provide. I can appreciate that they want to encourage self-reflection on evaluative methods for both hyper and non-hypertext. But immediately setting up this comparison in one’s mind seems restrictive as we look for ways to further expand our evaluative methods and criteria.

Moran and Herrington do conclude that hypertext will bring to light aspects that we have not previously considered. “Technology will have done what is seems always to do: It has made visible what was transparent, and has made us reflect on what we conventionally do” (256). The contrast between the two seems worthwhile to take note of, but I don’t think we should limit ourselves to focusing on the dichotomy.