Although I’m genuinely tired of hearing this phrase, I have to start with it because it’s an undeniable fact: The launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022 marked a seismic shift in the landscape of higher education. I consider myself lucky to have had a front-row seat when witnessing the transformative impact of AI on higher education in my country: I have recently transitioned from working in a writing center to leading a Competence & Career Center at a German University of Applied Sciences. Additionally, I work as a freelance trainer conducting seminars on “AI and Academic Writing” for academic…
Author: Bri Lafond
Isabella Buck
Dr. Bri Lafond (she/her) is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Millikin University and Virtual Events Chair of the Online Writing Centers Association. She researches content creators’ multimedia composing practices as well as how various technologies impact writing center tutoring, training, and governance.
As a new graduate student at Northeastern University in the 2010s, I remember attending several professional development workshops on multimodal writing. Touted as a more accessible, creative, and enjoyable approach to teaching writing, the assignments that the speaker shared looked like shadowboxes filled with visual and textual content. I sat with other graduate students and lecturers who taught in the university’s writing program and could hear both the excitement and the fear in the voices of my colleagues as we turned to the Q and A portion of the discussion. What happens if students do not know how to use…
My context for developing a multiliteracy center was unique and rather complicated. When I was tasked in fall 2017 with building a new student support center for UMass Dartmouth’s campus, I was prohibited from using the word “writing” in the name of this center. I will not go at length into the reasons for this, as I have had the opportunity to explain via a recent publication (see Botvin & Buck, 2024) but suffice it to say, the name and the purpose of this new center had to be deliberate and well-justified. The perspectives shared in the seminal 2012 Praxis…
As a writing center practitioner and digital media scholar, I’ve observed with great interest the increasing entanglement of digital technologies in students’ writing processes. I’ve assisted students who struggle to get their words down on paper by setting up voice-to-text tools, allowing them to compose a first draft verbally. I’ve learned about mind-mapping programs like Miro that students use to organize their ideas multimodally. I’ve seen students gain confidence by using Grammarly to correct their writing as they work. While these technologies can be a significant boon for writers, they also introduce new challenges: These instances and others like them…