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This essay examines the current state of online writing instruction in light of changing technologies and everyday literacies in order to understand their impact on access to higher education and on the material conditions of teaching writing.
You have to know and say your course goals out loud and clearly so all students have a chance to succeed as writers and thinkers. Online teaching requires professors and educators to constantly think about tone and the importance of follow-up. You also have an intimate chance of getting to know your students through their ideas and not just who raises their hand or speaks first. . . . Everyone's ideas are what we see first and foremost-not where you grew up or what you're wearing. . . . As a reluctant online teacher, I have been immensely gratified by my involvement with a broader (students are from all over the nation and the world) learning community.
-CCCC OWI Survey 39
In her Conference on College Composition and Communication Chair's address, Cynthia K. Selfe called on the field to "pay attention to how technology is now inextricably linked to literacy and literacy education in this country" (411). She argued that those linkages, leftunengaged and unexamined, would directly contribute to worsening educational and social inequities in the United States when they might, instead, be used to address such inequities. Now, fifteen years later, with more than 6 million postsecondary education students taking online courses (Allen and Seaman), Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) being widely discussed by politicians and journalists, and machine scoring of high-stakes exams drifting from future fiction to present reality, we cannot help but pay attention. Composition scholars have been heeding Selfe's call and adding their voices to it in the field's journals, professional statements, and websites. This essay joins those efforts by paying close attention to the state of online writing instruction (OWI) at a moment when the field seems poised to pivot, along with the rest of higher education. We place the results of the CCCC's survey of online writing instructors into the context of important shifts in literacy and technology in order to formulate key questions about access as well as the material conditions of teaching writing in a digital age.
Digital Literacies...