Documenting the long, proud history of OWI pedagogy

I'm psyched to share that a Computers and Composition article I co-authored with my four fantastic colleagues Jessie Borgman, Amy Cicchino, Heidi Skurat Harris, and Casey McArdle has now been published: "From correspondence to cloud: The history of research and online writing instruction"(1). 

As we describe in the abstract, in the article "we explore the historical trajectory of OWI through five distinct eras." Starting in the 1980s, we provide a detailed review of "landmark publications, organizational initiatives, educational crises, and technological inflection points to trace how OWI evolved into a sophisticated area of inquiry and practice." For 40 years, OWI has been driving innovation in Rhetoric & Composition/Writing Studies, carving out its own clear existence as a field.

Thinking ahead, especially with the issues posed by AI/LLMs for writing instruction, we close "with recommendations for how OWI can build on its rich history to address new and ongoing challenges."

The article includes a timeline of significant technology, distance ed, and OWI events as well as an extensive bibliography. 

I hope you have a chance to check it out. And if all goes well, several of my co-authors and I will be talking more about it in a Computers and Composition-supported round table at CCCC in 2027.

Note:

1) Borgman, Jessie, Amy Cicchino, Heidi Skurat Harris, Casey McArdle, and Scott Warnock. "From correspondence to cloud: The history of research and online writing instruction." Computers and Composition 80 (June 2026).

Writing instructors: Lean into our roots!

As I suppose many writing teachers are, I'm increasingly being asked about teaching writing now that AI is ever-present among us, especially teaching online, whether online writing instruction (OWI)-specific or not. My suggestions/recommendations are strongly based on my belief that we lean back into many of the long-term pedagogical strengths of Writing Studies/Composition and Rhetoric.

First off, it's not all a cosmic struggle vs. plagiarism. While authenticity is tied up with good instruction, we can't let plagiarism become a bugbear that obstructs us or distract us from fundamentally working with students to improve their writing.

We have for a long time had a lot to offer, and in OWI courses, especially asynchronous courses built on writing interactions, we can manifest much of these advantages by using, as I wrote earlier this year, a mix of approaches: 

• Process/drafting. We should continue to create learning environments in which students fundamentally engage in process-driven writing.
• Peer review. Peer-to-peer writing has many advantages, including that it creates authentic audiences for which students are responsible. Again, this means that while some (few) students might feel unabashed about putting an AI (or otherwise inauthentic) writing piece in front of a professor, they may think hard before placing such a piece in front of fellow students. In general, a lot of peer writing helps make the class a semi-public space.
• Informal writing. Students need to have many opportunities to connect writing and thinking. We can say it all we want, but we need to have students see it by giving them ways to use informal writing to build more complex projects.
• Low-stakes writing. Tying in with the above, I'm a believer in grading (almost) everything, but with the caveat that the grading be FLS: frequent and low-stakes.
• Unusual readings. As I wrote a few months ago, assign a "textual brew of unusual texts and discussion prompts." To put it simply, build assignments from texts that are less likely to be part of an LLM's database.
• Metacommentary/Reflection. Remember that us writing teachers are very good at this, with our long-entrenched embrace of portfolios, including for assessment. Last year, I wrote about how, "Metacomments push students to talk about their practice and to defend their choices." 
• Embracing the technology. Part of using metawriting and metathinking is bringing into conscious focus things around us that might otherwise be transparent. While you don't have to center your course (or even assignments) around technology, it is worth making sure technologies are not transparent: Have the students address their use of technology, even in short reflections.

These approaches and suggestions are not just Writing Studies/Composition pedagogy but are specifically how such pedagogies might manifest themselves through OWI. As those of us in the field of OWI have been saying for well over decade, at some point all writing instruction became OWI, and we cannot retreat into blue books because of technological change.  

 OWI is far from dead--long live OWI!

GSOLE Principles and Tenets revision presentation at CCCC 25 in Baltimore

Since its founding in 2016, the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE) has continued to grow and evolve, expanding its membership, initiatives, and offerings.

A key example of this evolution has been a recent effort by the GSOLE leadership (you can see current leadership here) to revise GSOLE's Online Literacy Instruction (OLI) Principles and Tenets, which were approved and published by the GSOLE Executive Board on June 13, 2019. Somehow, over five years have passed since our group developed these initial guidelines for OLI.

In education generally and literacy/writing specifically, much has changed since June 2019, and many of those changes, especially pandemic-related online learning and now the impact of AI, need to be examined in terms of the way we approach OLI. 

I'm part of this revision effort, and a hardworking group mainly broke up the work into subcommittees to evaluate how the Principles and Tenets might change. My subcommittee focused on AI.

We just learned of the acceptance of our proposal for CCCC 25 in Baltimore to present both the results of this work as well as the process we took to get there. We'll be eager to share the way that what we believe were fundamentally sound--they really are!--initial Principles and Tenets have adapted in the face of major changes in the landscape of OLI.

Kairos publication: "OWI—A Future of Challenge and Possibility"

I was fortunate to work with ten talented colleagues as part of the recently published multimedia interview project "OWI—A Future of Challenge and Possibility" in Kairos (1).

This innovative publication placed experienced online writing instruction (OWI) teacher-researchers in dialogue with each other about key questions in the field.

Initially, project leaders Jason Snart and Jessie Borgman asked each "author" to post a question in a brief 20-second or so audio and/or video. Snart and Borgman helped matched each question with another participant, who responded with a lengthier audio, video, or text.

Adding another layer, a different contributor then had the option to provide a short reply to each question's response.

Snart and Borgman encouraged free play among the ideas from the beginning, communicating via email that even if the questions the 11 of us initially drafted were not used as written, they "bet the ideas will re-emerge as our question-answer conversation builds, not to mention the very late stage of everybody having another chance to come in and do new replies or comment on comments, etc."

The result is an overlay of thinking and commentary, a web-like representation of knowledge creation that well suits OWI.

It is also the kind of unconventional publication that is characteristic of the OWI mind, and I was glad to have been a part of it. Check it out.

Note

1) Issue 28.2. In addition to Snart and Borgman Jennifer Cunningham, Natalie Stillman-Webb, Joanna Whetstone, Heidi Skurat Harris, Casey McArdle, Cat Mahaffey, Lyra Hilliard, and Mary Stewart.

Screens, attention, and mental health

I want my students to learn--of course!--but I mainly want them to be fulfilled and happy people. Writing is a path to those broader goals. I don't want fundamental aspects of my teaching to get in the way. I follow a teacherly version of the Hippocratic Oath. 

Lately, I've been thinking about how such general goals of student wellness might clash with online learning. Of course, as if this nearly 20-year-old blog weren't evidence enough, you should know that I am a firm advocate of the value of online learning, especially online writing (and literacy) instruction; simply, OWI gives students access to learning in ways they otherwise wouldn't. It extends the classroom in writing-rich ways. It's great.

But there are costs with any benefit, and one in particular resonated with me after I recently finished the book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. This fascinating book looks at "why we seem to have lost our sense of focus, and how we can get it back" (p. 9). Using a mix of research and anecdote, Hari unspools a series of causes; unsurprisingly several of them connect with our life around screens (although he discusses other strong trends and causes too).

Consider that students who sign up for our online courses do not receive an accompanying app that keeps them focused when they are "in" class, particularly asynchronous class. We can't control behaviors such as students distractedly scrolling the web while "in class" nor do we have control over if our class work doesn't push them over daily, weekly, monthly screen time limits.

Should we be looking into this more, and, if so, how? How might we approach conversations about limiting screen time in environments fundamentally mediated by screens? After all, many screens  have inherent characteristics, as Maida Lynn Chen in The Conversation pointed out in discussing insomnia, depression, and screens: "... the light emitted from most handheld devices, even with a night filter, a blue light filter, or both, is enough to decrease levels of melatonin, the primary hormone that signals the onset of sleep."

Intriguing research and pedagogical avenues seem open here for teachers to explore and critique the structure of their very courses.

We want to learn more, as students' education could be intertwined with tools that may have deleterious effects on their attention spans and perhaps their overall mental health. This, I suppose, is akin to ergonomics studies showing the effects of sitting in a chair all day at work or school and seeking solutions.

For this brief post, I did a cursory review of some research. The pandemic opened opportunities to study this area, for instance, the metastudy, "A systematic review of screen-time literature to inform educational policy and practice during COVID-19" in The International Journal of Educational Research Open by Siamack Zahedi, Rhea Jaffer, and Anuj Iyer, which looked at 52 studies but found them "too small," "inconclusive," or "critically underrepresented" and suggested, "These facts, along with the undeniable benefits of online learning in the absence of brick-and-mortar schooling and the ominous forecasts of learning loss caused by prolonged school closure, inform our recommendations for a more moderate policy and practical stance on restrictions...." Another is an Education Next article "Should We Limit 'Screen Time' in School?" by Daniel Scoggin and Tom Vander Ark; here is a link to a forum connected to that article.

Looking briefly at the available literature, I'm thinking about next steps, and, as I type away on the web interface of my computer (on a Saturday), I'm wondering if we need to develop tools--what would that even mean!?--to help our online students stay focused.

ChatGPT and online writing environments

Like many of you, I've been inundated with information about ChatGPT. For some, the sky is falling. For others, these generative AI language modeling technologies represent opportunity.

For many of us in the writing instructional world, the response is kind of this: Told ya so.

ChatGPT is more powerful than other AI apps, stretching way back to that old chatterbot Eliza. It can wow and amaze--to a point. If you ask it canned school writing topics/prompts, you'll get back canned responses. What's been surprising to me is how many people will say, "This looks like what a student could have written." That depends on what you've asked those students to write.

If you put students in conversational, multi-audience writing environments in which they write to discuss a variety of texts, not to prove knowledge mastery (or even that they've simply read), even another human trying to help a student cheater would struggle.

Such environments are the foundation of many online writing courses (OWCs).

In online writing instruction (OWI) workshops I conduct for faculty, I have a slide for when people inevitable express concerns about about plagiarism in the type of asynchronous OWCs we focused on. The slide would initially be blank, and then using a Powerpoint animation, a big red heart appears. "Colleagues," I would say, "If someone else is doing all this work, it's gotta be love!"

My point was that the work being done in my asynchronous writing courses was so extensive and involved that anyone who tried to replicate it, week in and week out, for another student would basically have to take the whole course in that student's stead. They would really have to like that person! I guess I could have alternated my big heart with a dollar sign, because such substitute studenting could only be done for love or money.

We may be worried about ChatGPT's ability to respond to writing questions/prompts such as "Describe Hamlet's indecision" or "provide reasons why you are for/against gun control," but teachers should always be concerned about student responses to these kinds of prompts.

To paraphrase crudely: It's the assignment, stupid. (I wrote about this in lay terms on my other blog.)

If you have students writing in multi-audience, multi-text environments such as class message boards, you're going to provide them with very specific rhetorical situations that it would be difficult for someone to engage in without clearly appearing out of place.

I'm back almost to day one on this blog: Use discussions/message boards and other asynchronous environments. Here is a brief example of a prompt I used in my first-year argument writing course plugged into ChatGPT and the AI model's response; I include comments in the text:

Peer review challenges [*My prompt]

Dear class, 

DePeter’s chapter focuses on providing “meaningful” peer review (Reid mentions review too). What has your experience been like through your school years as a peer reviewer? In terms of being a reviewee, what sort of specific revision challenges do you tend to encounter during the drafting process? How do you work with those challenges? 

I asked you this week to read Mai. What peer review advice might you offer this author? 

Thanks,
Prof. Warnock 

ChatGPT response 

As a language model, I do not have personal experience as a peer reviewer or reviewee [*AI honesty]. However, I can provide information on best practices for peer review. 

DePeter and Reid [These are readings from Writing Spaces, a superb anthology series designed for student writers to help them think about and study writing as subject matter] emphasize the importance of providing meaningful feedback during the peer review process [*Peer review is only mentioned tangentially in Reid's chapter]. This includes focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript [*The word "manuscript" doesn't appear in Reid or DePeter--it's a jarring, out-of-context word] , providing specific and actionable suggestions for revision, and approaching the review with a constructive and supportive attitude [*This is nice,  highly general stuff about peer review but not specific to DePeter; in short, anyone could have written it, and it doesn't answer the prompt]. 

In terms of specific revision challenges, authors may struggle with organization, clarity, and coherence of their manuscript [*Again]. They may also have difficulty with grammar and punctuation. To work with these challenges, authors should review their manuscript for these issues and consider seeking feedback from beta readers or a writing group [*Both of these terms are also jarring and acontextual considering the readings. These comments are, bluntly, much less interesting that what actual students said, some of whom had visceral, emotional experiences with peer review].

As for offering advice to Mai [*Mai is an award-winning first-year student essay found in Drexel's in-house annual publication, The 33rd], I would recommend that they [*They AI smartly chooses "they"] focus on the organization and coherence of their manuscript [Again, "manuscript"; Mai's piece is clearly an essay or even paper]. They may also consider seeking feedback from beta readers or a writing group [*Again, both of these terms are jarring considering the readings] to help identify any areas that may be confusing or unclear. Additionally, It's important for them to be open to feedback and willing to make revisions based on the feedback they receive. [This advice is obviously not specific to Mai's essay. Students in my course provided advice about her use of personal reflection as well as the kinds of sources she used. Responses like this make it evident the respondent did not read Mai's essay].

ChatGPT is indeed amazing and teachers are finding great applications for it: I've already collected scores of links. Teachers, it won't ruin our lives--but it may sharpen our teaching, if we let it.

What do they really want?

In my new position as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education in Drexel's College of Arts and Sciences, I have a renewed perspective on issues facing a university.

Our past two year's experiences with COVID-induced remote learning raised many questions, to put it mildly. A primary question we faced was what people really want from education, divided into stakeholders: What did students want? What did parents want? What did teachers want?

Seeking answers often led to difficult conversations, because, although this should be obvious, none of these groups had monolithic views of educational delivery and modality. Hearing the news, you might want to have a knee-jerk opinion and say, "Parents want their kids back in school" or "Students want to return face-to-face" or "Teachers don't want to go back into the classroom."

In truth, we saw wide variations within these populations. No question, our administration heard from parents who feel the price paid for college includes an in-person experience, even if these were "squeaky wheels" (at times it felt that every unhappy parent seemed to know our provost if not our president, and would they go right to the top with complaints). Yet other parents didn't want their students on the ground, in classrooms, dorms, and other shared spaces, while any remnants of the pandemic existed.

As I learned last fall in my own course, when we finally returned face-to-face, many students were exuberant about being back together in person. But some students have been among the most mask-conscious people I know and have been articulate about their own health concerns. Also, while some students loudly objected to they what they viewed as the lesser experience of online learning, some students loved the flexibility online and remote learning offered.

Many teachers were wary of returning to classrooms, especially being compelled to do so, but others were tired of teaching through masks and longed for the face-to-face experience that had drawn them to teaching in the first place. In terms of technology, while, sure, some instructors bumbled around in Zoom, many have learned, in ways that often surprised themselves, the advantages of remote, online, and hybrids, especially the "chrono-hybrids" I discussed previously.

COVID-19 is ongoing and will continue to present modality-based challenges. I do think we got a lot right. For instance, tough as it was, through the year we have tried to reduce the number of modality shifts after courses were listed on our term master schedule (TMS). Students are often surprisingly accommodating about these changes, but I think it is reasonable that the modality listed on the TMS should provide some level of assurance as to how a given class will be offered.

Simply, we can offer education in more ways now, so we shouldn't be surprised when it's more difficult to determine what people want. Students and faculty both realize that the old ways of teaching and studenting can yield to improved approaches. It's worth noting that I think that we have not done a great job communicating these things clearly to parents.

Education is multi-faceted and complex. Giving people what they proclaim to "want" isn't always the best solution. Part of the contract of education, one that makes it unusual, especially higher education, is that you pay someone to teach you content and in ways that challenge you. You cede to their expertise in ways that are supposed to help you be a more fulfilled person.

In general, for all demographics, we have to be clearer about articulating what it is we are doing and why, so that when our actions are not aligned with peoples' "wants," we can explain that course of action. Will this make everyone happy? Of course not! But it will help resist one overarching problem: When people feel decision-making is happening in a black box.

Fifth annual GSOLE conference this Friday

This Friday, January 28, the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE) will be conducting our fifth fully online annual international conference, "Visions and Sites of Online Literacy Education."

Conference Co-Chairs Cat Mahaffey and Tess Evans--who are also GSOLE Board Members--have assembled a terrific event, again providing an excellent opportunity for the many people interested in online learning in general and online literacy education (OLI) more specifically to gather and discuss the opportunities and challenges of online education. GSOLE is now a 500+ member-strong organization!

It's a full-day affair with over 70 presenters, as you can see in the conference program. GSOLE President Dan Seward provides a short welcome video and tour, and already available is a Praxis Poster Hall. The conference features seven concurrent sessions and plenaries by Central Michigan's Troy Hicks and the University of Florida's Laura Gonzalez. Links to all of these events will be activated on Friday. You can follow the activity and discuss your experiences using #gsole2022.

You can still register, and this event is designed to be user-friendly on the wallet: It costs $10 for GSOLE members and $5 for students and contingent faculty GSOLE members. 

This year, we're grateful to the University of Houston-Downtown Master's Programs for sponsoring our conference, and I hope attendees take a look at their programs.

GSOLE is constantly improving and evolving. Listen to Dan's welcome message to hear how the conference is responding to trends in online learning and how GSOLE is connecting both new and old voices to chart the next paths in OLI.

What is returning to the atom classroom with us?

We teachers did so many things differently over the past 18 months, when our teaching atoms all became bits. Many of us are cautious yet thrilled to be back face-to-face with students, and we recognize that many things we did pedagogically can carry back to our onsite classes. Following are a few thoughts and practices that have come to my mind in the first few weeks back f2f at Drexel.

Optimizing hybrids. As I have mentioned, much of our pandemic teaching slid into an unconventional "hybrid" zone: It was no longer the spatiohybrid of displaced class rooms but instead a chronohybrid of displaced time, mainly through blends of synchronous and asynchronous learning that was still all remote. Refining the articulations between, say, asynchronous conversation and in-class talk has always been a key challenge of hybrid learning, but many of us are now perhaps closer to that "sweet spot" because we had to regularly re-think how we used straightforward technologies such as message boards to enhance synchronous interactions such as Zoom conversations.

Better overall course directions. I'm avoiding just the word "syllabus" here, because I think our course instructions became in all of our course documents and the LMS interfaces that we had to rely on more heavily throughout the remote emergency teaching era. I think teachers have become more comprehensive in how we deliver instructions, use more productive repetition in our messages, and, in many ways, are creating much more user-friendly documents and instruction.

Hard-copy document "hygiene." I'm a big quizzer: I think reading quizzes help the class in so many ways. Normally, I administer and collect paper quizzes. It was always so easy! But after the first day of quizzes this term, I realized this was not a good pandemic practice. Instead, I simply moved the start-of-class, timed quizzes onto Blackboard, much as I had during Zoom instruction.

Recordings. My class is highly participatory, so recordings don't work that well. But I certainly could record, and now Drexel and other places have classes set up for this purpose while also providing some personnel to help create class recordings. Through the grapevine I'm hearing that recording a class is pretty easy, although teachers are figuring out how to overcome things like capturing both a chalk board and lecture clearly or how to pick up student questions effectively. 

In-class "ticker"? I'm still mulling this over, but I was such a fan of the chat in my Zoom classes that I had thought about possibly using a chat "ticker" projected on the wall of my classes to help shyer students participate. In my current onsite class, I was thinking about the same dynamic, although my current group is highly participatory and may not need this nudge.

I primarily want to be in a classroom where my students are safe. I also want them to be happy. I must say that they have stayed safe at least so far this term, and, man, do they appear to be happy, masks and all, in our 200-level course Language Puzzles and Word Games: Issues in Modern Grammar.