Ian O’Byrne
CV

W. Ian O'Byrne, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Literacy Education in the College of Charleston School of Education. This page offers a curated overview of my professional work.

Role
Associate Professor of Literacy Education
Leadership
Director, Initiative for Literacy in a Digital Age
Institution
College of Charleston, School of Education
Email
hello@wiobyrne.com

The complete dated CV is being updated and will be linked here when the new PDF is ready.

Areas of inquiry

  • Literacy as technologies change
  • Online reading, inquiry, and knowledge-building
  • Critical digital literacy, agency, and participation
  • AI, algorithms, and education
  • Privacy, cybersecurity, and digital sovereignty
  • Open knowledge, publishing, and the future of the web

Selected contributions

Research early in my career helped define the new literacies of online reading comprehension, work carried out with the New Literacies Research Lab. I later contributed to Mozilla's Web Literacy 2.0 framework and was part of the team behind NCTE's 2019 Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age. From 2013–2016 I served as Multiliteracies Department Editor for the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. Current work extends that thread into critical digital literacy, AI, and cybersecurity in K–12 education, including a 2025 NSF-funded project on integrating AI and cybersecurity into computer science teaching.

Career summary

Associate Professor of Literacy Education at the College of Charleston since 2015, following an appointment as Assistant Professor of Educational Technologies and Coordinator of the Instructional Technology & Digital Media Literacy Program at the University of New Haven (2011–2015). Earlier classroom and instructional-technology roles in Connecticut and Massachusetts schools and universities are detailed in the complete CV.

Education

Dec 2012
Ph.D., Educational Psychology (Cognition & Instruction) — University of Connecticut
May 2001
M.Ed., Secondary Education — University of Massachusetts Amherst
May 1997
B.A., English — University of Massachusetts Amherst

More

For the complete scholarly record, see Publications. For how I got here, see Education. For the roles and institutions along the way, see Experience. For talks, workshops, and advising, see Speaking & Collaboration.