About
I am an Educational Research Consultant specializing in digital literacy and child online safety. I earned my Ph.D. in Education with dual emphases in Cognitive Science and Technology & Society in 2009 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2008, I was awarded a Web Science Fellowship to complete my dissertation at the Oxford Internet Institute. In 2010, I became a Research Consultant at the Oxford Internet Institute and moved to the UK in 2011 to work as a Research Fellow.
At the Oxford Internet Institute, my work focused on three key areas and their interrelationships: digital literacy, information use, and online child safety. Within these fields, I contributed to the development of indicators for measuring media literacy across the EU for the European Commission, which has resulted in a practical, modular framework for national media literacy assessment as well as an examination of the methodological and political challenges of measuring national levels of media literacy. Simultaneously, I studied information use practices among scholars in the humanities and physical sciences to determine how technology is affecting their research, collaboration, and dissemination practices. In particular, I examined how the interplay between technical skills and scholarship affected practice, namely, who was increasing their use of technology, who wasn’t, and the significance of these choices for their practice.
In 2011, Victoria Nash and I received a grant from the John Fell Fund to study the extent of harms children experience as a result of being online. Together with Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova, we completed a critical synthesis of documented evidence of harms, drawing from studies across disciplines and including practitioner studies and charities reports. This work is ongoing, with current research focused on an analysis of international policy related to online child protection and an evaluation of the efficacy of interventions in reducing children’s online risky behaviors.
Working closely with universities, I currently advise multi-national organizations on research and programming strategies for online child protection and empowerment. Please visit slideshare to view recent presentations.
