Friday Plenary Speaker

Alison J. Head, Ph.D. is the Founder and Director of Project Information Literacy (PIL), a national research institute studying news and information in the digital age. She is an information scientist, social science researcher, and former new media professor who has led all 14 PIL studies. Dr. Head has held appointments as a Fulbright Specialist at Western Sydney University in Australia and as a Research Fellow and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Library Innovation Lab, and the metaLAB, all at Harvard University. She has also been a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Purdue University, University of Pittsburgh, and Stanford University. For the first seven years of PIL, Dr. Head was a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Washington’s iSchool.

About Project Information Literacy (PIL)
Project Information Literacy (PIL) is a nonprofit research institute in the San Francisco Bay Area. At PIL, small research teams of researchers have collected data from more than 22,500 students and recent graduates at 100 U.S. public and private colleges and universities, community colleges, and 34 high schools during the past decade. PIL has published 14 open access reports since 2009, examining how young adults interact with information resources for school, for life, for work, and most recently, for engaging with the news, algorithms, and climate change information. More about PIL is available at https://projectinfolit.org/  

Plenary Address: Information Literacy at a Critical Crossroads: Looking Backward to Move Forward