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New Cases
Visualize a scene from the late 1980s: in a
classroom you see a circle of computers with big monitors.
Students and a faculty member are sitting behind computers,
not talking to each other, all typing. The dialogue of the
class is appearing and scrolling up the screen. This was
back in the day when students rarely used email and the
terms "chat room" and "texting" had not yet been coined. For
many students in college, 'academic writing' was an arcane
art that your practiced so that faculty would give you a
good enough grade. This was an innovative project, one
of only a handful of composition classes in the country
where 'real time writing' was being used in an experiment to
see if it opened up new possibilities for students learning
academic writing as a means of communication.
Educational Network for Interaction (ENFI) was the name of
this approach; writing in real time provided a genre of
dialogue that was midway between informal oral discourse and
the formal written academic discourse that the students were
trying to learn. This mid-level written conversation
provided a very different ground and a different set of
instructional possibilities for the faculty member. It was
an exciting new idea at a time in the mid 1980s when the
term chat room was not yet widely known.
Trent Batson, who had invented this approach, had assembled
a team of faculty members from seven colleges and
universities. The Annenberg/CPB Project funded the ENFI and,
as monitor of that contract, I attended the first meeting of
the faculty after their courses had gotten under way.
It was about two months into the first semester, and the
discussion among these faculty had been going on, as I
recall, for about an hour and a half, maybe two hours. At
that point Laurie George, an English faculty member at the
New York Institute of Technology, turned to her colleague
Marshall Kremers and said rather quietly, "Marshall, you
should tell your story." He said equally quietly that he
didn’t want to. She elbowed him a little bit and said, "No,
you really should talk about this, it’s very important." So
he reluctantly began.
Kremers said that on the second or third day of class the
students in their writing had suddenly just erupted in
obscenities and profanities that filled up everyone’s
screens. The professor became just one line of text that
kept getting pushed off the screen by the flood of
obscenities coming onto the screen. Kremers kept typing
"Let’s get back on the subject" or "Won’t you quiet down?"
but the flood of student writing always pushed his words off
the screen. Although he thought about pulling the lectern
out from the corner and pounding on it, he decided, "No,
this is an experiment; I’ve got to stick with the paradigm."
So Kremers walked out on his class. He came back later,
either in the same class hour or the next class meeting, but
it happened again: they blew him out of the classroom. It
happened a third time. The fourth time, he told us, he
managed to crush the rebellion. I don’t think I’ve ever seen
a faculty member looking more ashamed or more guilty over
something that had happened in his classroom. He concluded
by saying, "I don’t know what I did wrong."
- Stephen C. Ehrmann
This case is adapted from a longer essay,
"What Outcomes
Assessment Misses." (1999)
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