Ian O'Byrne
Educator, researcher, and writer working at the intersection of literacy, technology, and learning.
- Role
- Associate Professor of Literacy Education
- Institution
- College of Charleston, School of Education
- Directs
- Initiative for Literacy in a Digital Age
- Elsewhere
- CV · Education · Book Notes · Publications · Contact
About
I'm Associate Professor of Literacy Education at the College of Charleston, where I've taught since 2015, and I direct the Initiative for Literacy in a Digital Age. Before Charleston, I spent four years directing a graduate program in instructional technology and digital media literacy at the University of New Haven, and before that I taught middle and high school English for most of a decade in Massachusetts public schools.
Research, teaching, and public writing are three ways of working the same question, not three separate tracks — the throughline runs through the Publications and Writing on this site as much as it runs through the classroom.
“What does it take to read, write, and think well as the tools keep changing—and who gets to decide?”
I'm interested in how digital systems can extend our reach without thinning the relational texture that makes learning and public life human.
Research interests
Literacy in changing digital environments
What counts as reading and writing keeps shifting as new tools, platforms, and interfaces enter people's lives. I study how people navigate those shifts, and what stays constant in literacy even as the surface keeps changing.
Critical digital literacy and agency
Being able to use a tool is different from understanding how it shapes people's choices, whose interests it serves, and when meaningful alternatives are available. This work looks at how people build the judgment to participate in digital systems while keeping that agency intact.
Teaching, learning, and knowledge-building
Classrooms are one of the places these questions get worked out in practice, not just theory. I'm interested in teaching and learning environments that help learners interpret, question, create, and contribute knowledge while developing their own judgment.
Contributions to the field
My work has often involved helping groups make sense of literacy as technologies change.
- Research — Contributed to research defining the new literacies of online reading comprehension, as part of the New Literacies Research Lab.
- Mozilla — Worked with Mozilla's Web Literacy community and co-authored the Web Literacy 2.0 white paper.
- JAAL — Served as Multiliteracies Department Editor for the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy.
- NCTE — Part of the team that wrote NCTE's Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age.
Follow the work
This site is the Library: the durable public record of my writing, reading, scholarship, and professional work. Digitally Literate is my newsletter and weekly field note—a trail of what I think is happening, what seems important, and what I'm working on and thinking about each week.
- Writing
Developed essays.
- Publications
The scholarly record.
- Book Notes
The reading trail.
- Digitally Literate
The weekly check-in on what I'm noticing, doing, and thinking.
- Work with me
For collaboration.