The Question Economy

So, nowadays, it's tough to come up with an original start when writing about AI and writing instruction. It's all, "As we know, doom, gloom..." etc. And if you don't face the woe from the go, you can easily be accused of being so tech bro.

Clear challenges lie in front of us, especially those of us who teach in online spaces, particularly asynchronous online spaces. Students can use AI in egregious ways to cheat and create inauthentic work in most disciplinary areas and most assessment modalities, e.g., computer coding, math problems, written essays. As has been well documented, AI can complete some entire courses.

Some teachers want to give up! I get it, but I still believe there is plenty for students learn, and that of course means there is plenty for us to teach. As I look at incorporating AI into my instruction, critical thinking just pops to the top. What could be more cliche? But in the face of AI, especially those of us who've taught for years with digital tools in general and online specifically, there is opportunity in front of us because of the core of our pedagogy.

Lately, I've been trying to (re)articulate/think through this as "The Question Economy": Framing students' educational experiences explicitly around deep, recursive questioning and inquiry. Of course, versions of critical thinking and question-driven teaching are what we have done for a long time, all the way back to Socrates through Freirean "critical pedagogy," about which Gerald Graff says "answers the needs of general education by providing access to the unified cultural tradition that was felt to be latent in the great literary texts beneath or above the merely fragmentary and incoherent flux of history and historical knowledge" (1).

With this idea of The Question Economy, I'm saying that we can re-organize (and maybe re-brand) what we're doing as helping students unite into active, critical learning environments, where, in direct response to AI, they are relentlessly, incessantly asking questions, especially in writing courses and, more broadly, humanities classrooms. 

The Question Economy is not only about questioning teachers, each other, and our shared texts but learning to work rhetorically with AI agents. Students as writers must learn to interact with the machine in ways not thought of even five years ago, and I'm suggesting by attacking this head-on we are not teaching them to prompt themselves out of jobs but instead to learn how they will use these knowledge tools to work more provocatively--and excitingly--on bigger problems. The calculator is a classic but still good example of this, as, in many ways, is the word processor: Tools that helped us past fundamental processes into more complex problem-solving.

In The Question Economy, students refine their critical thinking skills through a curriculum that discourages academic/intellectual passivity. Richard Feynman said “there is a difference between knowing the name of something and really knowing something" and discussed "the pleasure of finding things out" (2). Prompting with/to the machine is a way to valorize the knowledge search, helping students to learn to ask the right questions, the appropriate questions as they travel on their thinking/intellectual journey and to maintain--find? secure?--a humanistic place in this time of AI.

Notes 

1) Graff, Professing Literature, p. 163.

 2) Feynman interview: https://videos.cern.ch/record/1055846

Interview with Write Now Philly about Teaching Writing in the Age of AI

I had a great conversation with writer Khristina Cabrera from Write Now Philly about, as the title of the interview says, "Teaching Writing in the Age of Artificial Intelligence." As she termed it, we focused on  “navigating AI use in the classroom."

Interestingly, I've used a lot of pixels in this space to describe how and why I think asynchronous writing, often through message/discussion boards, is a strong way to teach in the writing class[room], but I tell Cabrera that while "I’m not disheartened by" AI in a writing pedagogical sense, using an asynchronous teaching model

isn’t as effective anymore, because AI is a big problem in discussion board conversations, so I’m thinking now, what can I do differently to continue to give students a good educational experience? I don’t want to think, how can I prevent them from cheating, because I think once you get into that deficit kind of approach, then it can be more frustrating.

It's certainly an ongoing challenge.

She had many thoughtful questions, and the interview helped me work through some thoughts about teaching and writing with AI.

The published interview promotes a recent publication of mine, but in this case the good news is that was really just a set-up for someone else's work, as I co-authored a forward I wrote for Amy Cicchino and Troy Hick's edited collection Better Practices: Exploring the Teaching of Writing in Online and Hybrid Spaces. Check it out!

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).

Maybe someday, "I taught an LMS today..."--but not yet

AI--yep, it's been infringing on fundamentals of writing instruction, as almost every professional conversation in the field would indicate. Teachers are scrambling to find reliable plagiarism checkers. Blue books and oral exams are re-emerging. People are eyeing retirement so they don't have to deal with this.

I have clearly staked out territory in my career as an advocate for asynchronous online writing courses (OWCs), working from my conviction that the written digital exchanges among OWC students are arguably better for their learning than onsite courses. I wrote in my 2009 book Teaching Writing Online: "The online environment also provides us with an opportunity specifically because of the subject matter of the writing course [...] Our constant efforts to work with student texts are unique and irreplaceable, and our model of technology use can be perhaps the most humanistic in the academy" (xxi)

"Unique and irreplaceable"--I feel like this been a wheelhouse for writing teachers, and a space that allows us to maintain student writing--as well as identity--authenticity.

But recent coverage of the release of Einstein, an agentic AI program that allegedly connects with common LMS systems and basically completes all coursework for students, has (even) me wondering about the endeavor. As reported in a February 26, 2026 Inside Higher Ed article by Kathryn Palmer, Einstein "logs into Canvas every day, watches lectures, reads essays, writes papers, participates in discussions, and submits your homework—automatically.”

This program and others that will undoubtedly follow carry the threat of a non-human agent making its way through a course in ways that may be indistinguishable from a human. Damn, I could teach a bot!

Michelle Kassorla, Associate Professor of English at Georgia State University | Perimeter College, Dunwoody, provided a good write-up/review of Einstein on her Academic Platypus Substack. Kassorla signed up for Einstein using a debit card with no money on it and her son's computer (to avoid institutional IT woes). She immediately saw that it's pricey for a college student: The Plus plan, the apparently lowest-tier, is $40/month. She recorded her experience and then quickly (in 2 minutes and 30 seconds) discovered "that Einstein is just a wrapper over OPENCLAW! AAAAAAAH I had just installed an agent that runs in the terminal in my son’s computer—potentially exposing EVERYTHING on it to the agent. I got off the recording ASAP to delete the program from my son’s computer." (1)

You can read more about Kassorla's take on a program of which she says, "However, it is probably duping students, who have no idea how dangerous it is."

Yet she ends with a glimmer of hope--at least for now. Kassorla makes some suggestions that online writing teachers can certainly relate to: "What can we do about this? Design your courses carefully, scaffold, make them process oriented, and put in some hard stops where students have to do a hard thing that you grade before they can move on."

At this point, there's still teacher volition, and I want to emphasize that the IHE article perked up my antenna a little because it says Einstein (my emphasis) "can help with any subject, including math, physics, computer science, history, literature and economics, and even keeps working when students are asleep." In that list, I didn't see writing--I see all content courses.

We're still teaching humans. There are challenges out there, but we're not spending our time only making bits in Canvas "smarter," not yet. 

Note:

1) According to Wikipedia,"OpenClaw serves as an agentic interface for autonomous workflows across supported services. OpenClaw bots run locally and are designed to integrate with an external large language model such as Claude, DeepSeek, or one of OpenAI's GPT models."

Process Narration Videos and authentic student writing

Just like everybody else in writing classrooms nowadays, I'm dealing with AI. I like to think I'm mostly working with it, although, my sanguine teaching nature aside, I'm for sure at times working against it.

In several classes, I've overtly invited students to write about and sometimes even for the machine, as in my recent Language Puzzles and Word Games: Issues in Modern Grammar course, which includes this writing project choice (among many): "Using a prompt similar to an assignment from one of your courses, compare the text created by a generative AI chatbot/natural language generator with your own writing specifically in terms of grammar and usage."

In the Fall, I got to talking to an exceptional student, Veronica Medlock, about the drafting process in her writing. After that conversation, she quickly created and sent me a short YouTube video of the drafting changes while she composed, accompanying the video with a voice narration of the process.

It was fascinating.

We're trying to take this show on the road and have sent in a conference proposal about how such "Process Narration Videos," as we're calling them, can help promote and support authenticity in student writing assignments. Students can compose and submit these easy-to-create videos, which are built on the draft stage "mapping/tracking" that is a fundamental component of writing composition tools like Word and Google Docs, with accompanying voice narration.

Why is this so great? Of course, the English and writing teaching and learning literature has been overflowing with discussions about the problems of teaching writing in the--dare I call it?--age of AI. Teaching publications are dedicating focused space to AI (1) and instructors nearly every day receive invitations to professional development opportunities or information about new ed tech tools. Language and literacy teachers at all levels (and, of course, in many, if not all, other academic disciplines, e.g., math and programming) are dealing with the challenges of AI in teaching with a range of attitudes, approaches, tools, and philosophies. 

Some of my colleagues feel the authenticity problem is so dire that they are abandoning process-driven writing approaches and are instead returning to blue books or other non-digital, offline writing approaches. Those who have not given up have taken various often time- and energy-consuming stances and approaches: Requiring increasing amounts of informal writing, carefully scrutinizing the drafting process, leaning heavily on AI checkers in a kind of technological arms race, etc.

But as part of an overall writing pedagogy, Process Narration Videos provide a foundationally sound, pedagogically driven solution to authenticity issues in writing instruction. They reinforce good writing pedagogy, as they are grounded in writing process and ask students to reflect on their writing. They also help students see different stages of their writing, incorporate metathinking, consider rhetorical choices, and embrace informal writing, which of course is often embedded in strong writing processes.  

If our proposal gets accepted, Veronica and I will discuss the compositional background of this approach while focusing on the practical, hands-on way that it can be applied in classrooms across educational levels and curricula.

An important point is that students are often as frustrated by the prospects of other students using AI as their teachers are. So we're aiming to hit a nice balance: While Process Narration Videos can serve a dutiful--and responsible--academic process in discouraging AI-connected plagiarism, they are also simply good teaching and learning practice.

Note:

1) The topic of the most recent issue of CCC [77.1] was, as the Editors’ Introduction stated, “A Dappled, Undisciplined Response to Generative AI."

Narrating a research journey

While we were teaching... lots of questions for writing instruction, especially in digital environments.

As I always say, I'm not playing cops and robbers with my students, but we have to be responsible; we have to keep sharpening the way we approach writing assignments. Much like we always should be doing, we've got to use common sense to help students do their best work. AI is just the latest temptation for them not to do so.

Sources are an issue. Since search engines have evolved, there has always been an opportunity for students to come up with wild sources: Where did some of these things come from? 

Aside from the well-established "hallucination" issues that come up when we use AI as a research tool--and remember, that type of search is not what LLMs are primarily designed for or good at--it can also dig up/create material from who knows where.

A way to help combat this is a twist on the annotated bibliography: Ask students, using plain language and perhaps images, to narrate the research path they've taken. I'll frame it like this for students:

Tell me for each source in your bibliography/references/works cited:

1. What tools or apps you used for the search, or, alternatively, who you talked to.
2. What prompts you used to generate your references: Reproduce them verbatim.
3. How much did you each resource when choosing to add it to your resource list?
• This is a shame-free zone: Did you read the abstract? Glance through it for a key word, author, or quote? 
• Reflect on what you did: This will be of interest not just to me but I imagine to you as well.
4. How did you extract information into your project?
• Did you use quotes, paraphrased material, data? 
5. How did you create the citation?

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, and this is not necessarily something you would use only in OWCs, but because of the text-heavy environment of the OWC, a "research narrative" might be particularly useful there.

On the novelty scale, this approach is pretty tame, but it provides--in what I would argue is a constructive, reflective way--an overt learning strategy for students to describe how they are interacting with AI and search tools to generate the sources and knowledge that form the basis for much of their writing projects.

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!