The Pace of Progress.

Dear GSOLE Members,

As February arrives, I find myself thinking back with real gratitude to everyone who shaped this year’s conference. The event felt alive with generosity, curiosity, and the kind of intellectual honesty that marks GSOLE at its best. Because we are a volunteer‑led organization, nothing we do happens automatically; it happens because people give their time, their imagination, and their labor. Thank you for that work.

Maha Bali opened the conference with “Creating Compassionate Learning Communities Online,” a plenary that invited us to think carefully about what equitable hospitality looks like in digital spaces. She urged us to consider how we structure engagement, how we spend our energy, and what it means to design environments that make room for students and colleagues to show up as their full selves.

Later, Heidi McCauley guided us through a ten‑year retrospective that reminded us where GSOLE began and why our history matters. By tracing our roots in the CCCC OWI Special Interest Group, she highlighted GSOLE’s longstanding commitments to inclusion, expertise, and responsiveness that have shaped our identity from the start. Her call to carry those commitments into the next decade resonated.

Throughout the program, synchronous and asynchronous presenters explored a broad mix of questions that online writing educators are wrestling with right now. We heard about wellbeing and belonging in digital environments, the messy and urgent realities of generative AI, evidence‑driven pedagogies in composition courses and across the disciplines, and the evolving role of online writing centers in supporting writers. These conversations pushed us to rethink the choices we make and to consider how our pedagogies cultivate both critical technological literacies and the wellbeing of our students, colleagues, and ourselves.

We also celebrated the accomplishments of members whose research and practice are shaping the future of the field. Our 2025–2026 research award recipients included Xiao Tan of Utah State University; Mariya Tseptsura of the University of Arizona and Michelle Stuckey of the University of Oregon; and Cornelius Fuumaale Suom Kogle of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. We also recognized the inaugural winners of two new GSOLE awards. The Beth Hewett Dissertation Award went to Meghalee Das, whose dissertation on culturally inclusive online pedagogical strategies provides both a critique of embedded assumptions in educational technologies and a set of practical frameworks for more inclusive learning environments. The Scott Warnock Practitioner Award went to Kole Matheson of Old Dominion University, whose materials demonstrated careful assignment design, thoughtful contract grading, and a sustained commitment to student‑centered practice.

We hope the conference marks the beginning (but not the end) of these valuable conversations. To continue these discussions, I hope you will join us at the Annual Meeting on April 2, where we will look ahead to GSOLE’s next decade, and at our monthly Cyber Salons, which offer informal spaces to connect with other online literacy educators. This newsletter also highlights our final webinar of the season and several other opportunities to stay involved in the months ahead.