GSOLE: Can we think about it all as literacy?

So I’m posting two consecutive “organizational” posts, but there’s a lot going on in the world of OWI, and I want to get it out there.

It’s not every day that you get to be part of a new organization/society/ association. This past April at the CCCC meeting in Houston, I was honored to take part in the launching of GSOLE, the Global Society for Online Literacy Educators.

GSOLE is the brainchild of my good friend Beth Hewett, and she is our first president. She has developed this idea that OWI should be broadened beyond writing to literacy, including reading and digital composition. From her letter on the homepage (https://www.glosole.org/):

We are an international organization of teachers, tutors, and researchers dedicated to diversity, inclusivity, and access in literacy-based online education. We share an understanding that the key component linking all of online education is literacy. Although online education tends to remove the immediacy and intimacy of face-to-face instruction, we suggest that successful teaching and learning in online settings are more deeply connected to literacy-based concerns than to physical presence or lack thereof. Three of the core literacies of the 21st century are reading, writing, and digital composition. However, these literacies largely have been studied and taught separately, and the resulting discussions about them have occurred in discrete sub-disciplines where their connections have not been fully explored or acknowledged.

Reading. It gets left out of so many higher ed conversations about learning. We assume students can/should be able to do it or don’t have the expertise to teach it or are too embarrassed to admit we don’t do it well & etc. I am this term again teaching The Peer Reader in Context, the Drexel course that prepares undergraduates to tutor in our writing center. I love our text, Bartholomae & Petrosky's Ways of Reading, which, in its introduction, asks students to focus on their practices and assumptions about reading. Textbooks, they write in that introduction, "are good examples of books that ask little of readers outside of note-taking and memorization" (5). (1) Reading in college is often simply transparent.

Digital composition. While those in the field of comp/rhet have written and investigated multimodality and digital composition for some time, you could argue that alphabetic writing still dominates, not only in pedagogical practice but in what we think of as composition or writing instruction.

The idea behind GSOLE is to bring together writing and reading instruction with digital composition under one inclusive, virtual tent. As I suppose with any new thing, we spent a heck of a lot of time developing the name. We are still developing the organization's structure. We know we will have Webinars and a certification sequence for OWTs. We will have a journal. We will also, through our site, provide an opportunity for developing a community of those interested in online literacy education. We have, in my estimation, the right people involved to get it all done.

GSOLE is exciting because what we’re hoping is the idea of literacy can move to the forefront of OWI conversations. It's not so much that OWI will become OLI by nomenclature, but that our pedagogical and research agendas will reflect this broader concept of literacy. We think this is the future, and we hope you will join us.

Note:
1) I still like the 9th edition of this text.