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.

Plenary Address: Information Literacy at a Critical Crossroads: Looking Backward to Move Forward  
AI, algorithmic bias, deep fakes, and the spread of misinformation and disinformation: These are all signs of a changing information landscape that’s kicking up anxiety levels and making us question almost everything we thought we knew about information literacy. What’s a librarian to do? At this critical crossroads, we can either be hesitant about the future where enormous unknowns loom large, or we can be decisive and look to the past to make sense of where we are headed. Drawing together key threads from historic studies by Project Information Literacy (PIL) about how college students conduct research through the lens of their experiences, I'll highlight important things students have been telling us for years. But have we really been listening? Our latest survey on how students’ information worlds shape our understanding of climate change extends these insights even further beyond the classroom with implications for us all. In this talk, I explore what we can learn from the past to inform the future of information literacy to deliver what all of us need in these uncertain times: information agency.  

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/