CFP: ROLE: AI & OWI

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No Fate But What We Make for Ourselves: AI in Online Writing and Literacy Instruction

Call for Proposals! Spring 2026
Proposals Due: November 1, 2026

We are pleased to announce a call for proposals for the spring issue of Research in Online Literacy Education (ROLE), the peer-reviewed research journal of the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE). This issue engages with the now seemingly ever-expanding conversation surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) and online writing instruction (OWI) and research.

Long before the seemingly ubiquitous proliferation of AI platforms available to the everyday user, writer/director James Cameron was stoking our fears about computer self-awareness. In his universe, the Skynet funding bill was passed in the US Congress on August 4th, 1997. Less than one month later, on August 29th, 1997, Skynet became self-aware, forcing humanity to pivot desperately to shut it down, while the new military AI defended itself by beginning a full-scale assault known as Judgement Day (Cameron, 1984; Cameron, 1991). Cameron, of course, was not the first writer to raise questions about AI; after all, see works by Philip K. Dick, Issac Asimov, Gene Roddenberry, Glen A. Larson, Ridley Scott, Stanley Kubrick, or even Mary Shelley’s Monster in Frankenstein. One common theme across these imaginative stories reigns supreme: beware the sentience of artificial intelligence.

Yet, this refrain is nothing new. What if, instead of AI, we substitute “technology” more generally? Plato, for instance, seriously distrusted writing, lamenting that “it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it” (ca. 360 B.C.E./2020, p. 196). Walter Benjamin (ca. 1935/2010) raised questions about artistic authenticity in the wake of the technological reproduction of written and graphic art, whether through photography, lithography, or typesetting. However, perhaps Walter Ong (2002) said it best: “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness and never more than when they affect the word” (p. 81). AI (e.g., generative like ChatGPT, Gemini, and CoPilot, reactive like IBM Deep Blue, predictive text, etc.) technology has the potential to move far beyond an exterior aid and, instead, begin to challenge the boundaries between technology and the text–be it alphanumerical, visual, aural, tactile, or spatial. Such expanded definitions of a text can be daunting on some level as they can completely change how we think of our work as online literacy/writing scholars and practitioners. It may even raise questions about how and if AI will replace writing educators, and in a time of austerity, the need to position ourselves as invaluable is imperative. Put another way, “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves,” (Cameron, 1991, 56:16 mins) meaning how might we encourage a favorable fate by using AI tools effectively.

The journal editors invite scholars, teachers, and practitioners working broadly in online literacy education to imagine our fates through theorizing and applying what we make of AI in our classrooms, research endeavors, and digitally mediated communication. More specifically, we invite you to address/extend/challenge one or more of the questions below:

  • What aspects of the cognitive writing process are going to be replaced, changed, extended, or complicated by AI?
  • What are current best practices/ethics in teaching, composing, designing, and/or interpreting AI-assisted texts? What space, if any, should be given to such explorations with AI in online writing and literacy instruction?
  • What new conventions are emerging related to prompting, source gathering, output verification, citation, and study design?
  • What new literacies must be developed in the wake of AI’s capabilities (or lack thereof)?
  • What impacts might AI have on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues?
  • What are the conversations around AI and notions of ability, disability, and productivity?
  • How is AI challenging our notions of faculty productivity, research, and/or responding to student writing?
  • What impact does AI have on online pedagogy, digital literacy, and/or multimodal composing?
  • What new opportunities for targeted research might AI offer teachers and students as they pursue various inquiry efforts? When/is it appropriate to incorporate AI assisted research in a writing classroom?
  • What questions should we raise with students about the use, abuse, and understanding of AI in composition across multimodality?
  • How does AI open up conversations about how teachers, students, and administrators work collaboratively or perhaps independently?
  • What tutor training or writing center practices can be provided for developing and experienced tutors concerning AI-assisted writing with the compositions they review?
  • In what ways do WAC/WID programs engage with AI initiatives across campuses, institutions, and disciplines?
  • What opportunities exist for larger discussions about data privacy and data coalition related to AI tools?
  • If there is no fate but what we make for ourselves as practitioners of online writing instruction, then what strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities might we imagine for AI use across classrooms, research, and digitally mediated communication?

We welcome proposals for full-length research articles (4,000-6,000 words) that engage with the impact of emerging AI on your teaching, tutoring, instructional design, learning, and research. Presenters at GSOLE conferences are especially encouraged to submit a proposal based on your presentation. We also invite submissions that push the boundaries of form to imagine other ways of presenting academic research, embodying the spirit of ROLE’s founder, Michael Greer, where our discussions are “not just another journal, but another kind of journal.”

Submit 500-word proposals role.

References

  • Cameron, J. (1984). The Terminator. Orion Pictures.
  • Cameron, J. (1991). Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Tri-Star Pictures.
  • Benjamin, W., & Jennings, M. W. (2010). The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility [First Version]. Grey Room, 39, 11–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27809424. (Original work published 1935).
  • Ong, W.J. (2002). Chapter 4: Writing restructures consciousness. In Orality and Literacy (pp. 77-113).Taylor & Francis Ltd/Books.
  • Plato. (2020). Phaedrus. In P. Bizzell, B. Herzberg, & R. Reames (Eds.), The rhetorical tradition: Readings from classical times to the present (3rd ed., pp. 161–199). Bedford/St. Martin’s. (Original work published 370 BCE).