After this really quite successful MOO meeting we had the aforementioned face-to-face session where three of the students presented the papers they had prepared for the rest of the group and we discussed these. The others in the group had either not had the time to prepare properly, or not wished to make a presentation, so we spent a bit longer on discussing those of the ones that had. There had been no strong obligation communicated from my side on this score: the presentation seminar was merely a chance for those that felt they had someting to write about at that time to get some response on the basis of what they had prepared and presented from the rest of the group. It turned out that this was also a useful preparation for the examinations, as I subsequently discovered that a lot of points that had been raised in that session had been developed further in a quite satisfactory way in the examination papers. Several of the students who had not presented papers had obviously also gleaned some useful arguments and thoughts from those who did present and from the discussions afterwards.
The next day we had one final face to face meeting to sum up the whole course and to discuss the examination and what sort of expectations I had from them in that respect. Several felt that there had been so much of the course spent in MOO-ing, and relatively little time spent on lecturing that they were afraid that their papers in the examination would not be up to "university standard", with regard to the theoretical side of things. I explained that since this was a research-based course where we were working from an abductive or retroductive reasoning model, the point was precisely not to have too many preconceived ideas or presuppositions about what we would find when we entered the virtual environment and worked together there for a while, or about how it might be structured, and instead take our point of departure in change, and in phenomena that seemed novel or strange to us, and to try to develop hypotheses that might possibly be able to explain these in a more general kind of way. In such a model the phenomenological data of each participants' experience of the situation is the most important basis for further reasoning, which should take its point of departure in past experience and understandings, and the ideas and thoughts that the confrontation of these with new experiences generate. When these are thrown out into the dynamics of the larger generative semantic space of the interpretative community being developed within the group, then more coherent understandings will develop over time.
At the end of the semester the students went up to a written 6 hour examination. In one sense, it seems paradoxical that a course related to the use and functionality of modern hypermedia tools in humanities studies is evaluated solely on the basis of a 6 hour handwritten examination. Also, when there had been so much group work during the course, its is rather strange that there are no credits given, explicitly at least, in the final examinations for this group work. Of course this is not really the case; the situation is much more nuanced than so. The written examination was, as mentioned previously, based on the conversational logs from the MOO sessions during the course, and the discussions and other activities in the classroom. The examination questions (see Appendix X) that the students were asked to answer were formulated in such a way as to allow them to expand and reflect on various aspects of their own concrete experiences and the thoughts, questions and ideas that had ocurred to them during the MOO sessions. The session logs were provided as appendices to the examination questions so that direct reference could be made to these in the answers. Independent thinking and reflection about the group processes of normative change were explicitly encouraged, as well as the drawing in of relevant ideas and concepts from the theoretical part of the course.
In the interdisciplinary writing research environment with an epistemological grounding in praxis- oriented theories of writing, literary theory, and socio-interactionist, cultural and sociosemiotic theories of text and meaning making which is where this project has its existential niche, the school or university examination is not considered a terminating event, but as a form of ritual writing practice which is one of many others in a continuing process of further meaning making through many different kinds of textual practices. In this respect, the student papers written under quite high pressure during the examination situation, without any other form for technical aids than the MOO session logs and the examination questions can of course not be anything more than rough drafts of more thoroughly reworked and discussed papers or articles, and must be evaluated as such. In the next few paragraphs I would like to refer briefly to the evaluation process, and discuss some issues related to the role of examinations in the development of scientific writing.
When I evaluated the student papers I based my assessments on the above considerations, and on the potential that I saw in the ways in which the students had chosen the topics that they expanded upon and the ways in which they reasoned in doing so. I gave highest priority to original and imaginative thinking, and to critical and useful incorporation of some of the theoretical perspectives that I had presented, and from the required course reading into their argumentation. I also evaluated the extent to which the log materials had been incorporated and interpreted in the discussions in the answers. The external examiner and I spent several hours on the phone discussing how to use the assessment scale, and discussing the individual merits and demerits of each student paper. This was a necessary process because he had little knowledge and experience of the kind of perspectives on communication in virtual environments that I had based my course around, and which the members of the group had developed during the course. The student essays were also non-conventional in the sense that they had not been asked to present someone else's point of view or theory, but to incorporate other ways of thinking and categorizing phenomen related to changing textual norms into their own resonnements. He had been impressed by the high standard of the discussions in the papers, but had had difficulty in applying the assessment scale over a wider range. In the Norwegian university system, the scale goes from 1.0, which is the highest attainable result, to 4.0, which is what would be given for a blank paper . The grade 2.5 (laudamus) is considered the threshold for higher end of the scale. In order to enter the university graduate program for example, students have to achieve a mean grade of 2.5 over all the separate course modules that they take in the building up of their studies. The external examiner had placed most of the papers in the middle of the upper half of the scale, i.e. between 2.1 and 2.3, and found it difficult to grade more finely than this. That meant that the group as a whole achieved a mean of around 2.2. I on the other hand had used a wider range of the scale, i.e. from 1.7 to 2.5, which was in fact quite easy for me, since I had taken part in all the discussions in the group (apart from some colloqiums which the students had organized themselves in order to discuss the logs and the required reading material assigned by me), and as a result was better able to spot individual strengths and weaknesses within the group. Since he had set his preliminary mean assessment grade as high as he had done, we were able to reach a concensus on applying a wider range of the scale quite easily. The final mean result for the group then turned out to be 2.1 which I believe was representative for the general level. This adjustment of individual grades would not however have been possible for the external examiner without him conferring with me as teacher. I personally believe that it is very important to extend the assessment scale as much as possible in order to stimulate the creativity and independence of the students as academic writers. Since the group represented a fairly non-homogeneous social field where participants had a quite wide range of different academic backgrounds and were at quite different stages of their respective academic careers, I felt it was important that the full range of this non-homonogeneity be reflected in the grades that were finally assigned.
The textual norm systems and practices that constitute the social field developed round examinations where the school essay as genre is evaluated in the Norwegian secondary education system are at present being mapped (see Berge 1996). The aim of that particular study is to unveil the textual norms[39] and doca [40] adapted to the task of evaluating the genre of examination essays in Norwegian. One of Berge's conclusions which is of interest in the present context is that even for written Norwegian essays of a more standard kind "neither an examiner doxa nor textual norms have developed in relation to genre tasks in ways that make it reasonable to claim that examiners constitute a reasonably well-developed interpretative community." (Berge 1996 p. 641, my translation from the original Norwegian). This is explained by the fact that the examination field for Norwegian secondary level education essays is constituted as a complex communication system the main goal of which is that candidates wish to obtain an evaluation by an examiner. The goal is not to reflect, categorise or develop common understandings between communicating participants, but that the evaluator gives the evaluated a grade. The banal act of evaluation is however carried out as an act where it is assumed, simulated or played that reflection, categorisation and the development of common understandings between communicators is going on.
This study shows amongst other things that the examination and evaluation practices of examiners which are called into function in order to evaluate student texts as more or less acceptable relative to the social field of the Norwegian school examination system represent a culturally constitued, and relatively closed qualifying textual norm system. Examiners' conceptualisations (the examiner doca), developed over time and based on their indivdual pedagogical and evaluation practices, of what makes a given text "good" or "bad" form the basis for qualitative evaluation criteria (textual norms) that are used to evaluate and grade these texts, which in turn come to constitute an own genre: the "examination text". Since these textual norms have been developed relative to the quite specialised context in which they are to be used, they cannot be considered referents of some universal cognitive capacity. What is rather disturbing about the aforementioned study is that all attempts up to now that have been made by the Norwegian educational authorities to introduce new forms of writing tasks (more "creative" or "analytically demanding" genres such as the causerie, short stories, essays, text, literary and pictorial analyses) and practices (such as process oriented writing) into the secondary education system have not been followed up by appropriate changes in the doca and norm systems of the examiners who are evaluating students' writing. Berge attributes this to a tendency to a kind of "viscosity" - a stabilization of the doca - within the social field being studied which works to maintain a system of evaluation based on norm-formalisation, rather than norm-negotiation.
There seem to be four main reasons for this socio-cultural "viscosity" in the examination field:
1. examiners cannot see what the alternative to the traditional "rational argumentative" essay might be.
2. examiners do not believe that candidates master, or will come to master, any alternative norms and/ or sender positions.
3. examiners perceive candidates as not having acquired any acceptable alternative norms in the training for writing that they have gone through.
4. alternative examination forms open for kinds of writing that many examiners do not believe that schools should estimate highly.
(Berge 1996, p. 646)
What distinguishes a system designed (or evolved) for norm-formalisation and one designed (or evolved) for norm-negotiation is the degree to which candidates are delegated authority.
The problem here is that there is a tendency to maintain a situation where no real communication in relation to people or the world outside of the closed system of the examination field is intended, and where there is only a de facto simulation of such real communication processes. Since the evaluators of the texts apparently do not have any clearlydefined sets of textual norm systems relative to new forms of writing, they are not really capable of evaluating new (i.e. innovative) forms of writing or text-production on behalf of students. Seen in a wider perspective, in relation to the introduction and use of new kinds of technologies and media for writing and communication which will tend to challenge existing textual norms in new ways, this means that merely introducing new forms of writing or text-production processes is not enough. There will also have to be initiatives at the level of teacher training in order to make teachers (and thus examiners) much more aware of the potential of new technologies and also of possible new kinds genres and systems of textual and interactional norms related to text production and classroom writing practices that might emerge as a result of using these new technologies for academic writing.