Jessie Borgman & Amy Cicchino 

"Opening Doors and Building Community for the Future of Online Literacy Education"

In this co-keynote presentation, Amy Cicchino (GSOLE immediate past president) and Jessie Borgman (The OWI Community co-founder, past CCCC OWI Standing Group Chair, and GSOLE founding secretary) explore how online writing instruction (OWI) and online literacy instruction (OLI) as a sub-field of writing studies has always responded to disruption and change with an open door policy, welcoming everyone into their community spaces and working together to identify solutions and paths forward. This keynote celebrates our OWI/OLI communities and invites participants to embrace possibility amidst disruption.

We will begin by exploring OWI and the field’s history as a community of collaborative researchers and practitioners. Then, we will trace the people, networks, resources, and shared practices that have sustained OWI and OLI across decades of technological and social change. We will next consider how this robust infrastructure can help us respond to the persistent challenges we face today. Finally, we will look forward, inviting participants to remember the strong foundation already beneath us and to decide, collectively, what we will build upon it. The future of OWI/OLI does not belong to any one organization. Like its past, that future will be something we build together in community.

Jessie Borgman is a Senior Instructor in the Writers' Studio at Arizona State University. She has taught both face-to-face and online but primarily teaches online. Her research interests include online writing instruction, instructional design, content strategy, user experience. She has published and presented at conferences extensively and has held various leadership roles on the CCCC OWI Standing Group and Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE). She is the co-creator of The Online Writing Instruction Community resources website. She is the co-author of Personal, Accessible, Responsive, Strategic: Resources and Strategies for Online Writing Instructors (winner of the 2020 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award), and co-editor of two PARS in Practice collections. Together with her writing partner, Casey McArdle (Michigan State University) she was the co-winner of the 2023-2024 Computers and Composition Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field.

Amy Cicchino is Immediate Past President of GSOLE and Associate Professor and Director of the University Writing Center at the University of Central Florida. She regularly teaches in hybrid and online modalities and practices synchronous online tutoring in the writing center. Her research takes up writing praxis and digital composition, experiential and high-impact learning experiences, and writing program administration and has appeared in journals such as WPA: Writing Program Administration, Effective Practices, the International Journal of ePortfolio, and the Writing Center Journal, among others. Her recent edited collection with Troy Hicks, Better Practices: Exploring the Teaching of Writing in Online and Hybrid Spaces (2024), won the 2024-2025 Computers & Composition Johndan Johnson-Eilola Distinguished Book Award and received an honorable mention for the 2025 CCCC Outstanding Book Award.