I recently delivered a keynote at the Indiana Teachers of Writing conference, sharing my perspective on the digital future of writing pedagogy. With nearly all writing activities now digitally mediated through devices and platforms, instructors have an opportunity to reimagine their teaching for 21st century learners.
I argued that embracing the affordances of digital will be key – with creative elements like design, interactivity, multimedia, and experience design playing an increased role in how we think about writing. But also that with the integration of AI into writing workflows, we will also see a fundamental shift in core practices: the speeding up of the production of writing and the shifting of the labor of writing, will invite not only new rhetorical skills like prompt engineering, but a fundamental reinvestment in foregrounding the rhetoric strategies at the core of writing.
To illustrate the possibilities (both for today and going forward), I highlighted student projects leveraging digital storytelling, from interactive webtexts to immersive Minecraft EDU projects. As always, the student examples tend to steal the show, as they were not only received well, but seemed to inspire some educators to think about the range of ways they might evolve their activities, assets, and assignments in and through a kind of digital-inflection.
My core message was that we must embrace the moment and guide students into the current and coming digital terrain, where writing takes on dynamic, collaborative new forms. For example, with AI and generative writing increasingly being built into authoring platforms, texts will be more visual, experiential, and participatory.
Further, as I’ve argued in my book, Post-Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic, writing will also be rooted in the act of collaboration – the result of co-creation process between the human author and the technology itself as an agent. Instead of individual will-to-mastery, writers must direct the technology through rhetorical awareness and audience understanding. And what matters here is not so much the technology itself, but the human condition: i.e., what each human brings to this evolving human-technology assemblage at the core of the act of writing.
By embracing this future, we can empower students to find their voices as digital writers. The possibilities for remixing and reimagining writing pedagogy are vast. This transformation will require open minds, but the rewards for student engagement will be immense. And I simply can’t wait to see how educators at all levels, but writing teachers in particular, critically and creatively begin to reimagine their learning space, what they want to focus on, and the what and how of learning assessment.
I’ll also lead a post-keynote session on Generative AI & Composition, focusing on a mix of playing with generative tools and discussing an ethics of practice for the use in the classroom.
Justin Hodgson 