Pamela Wisniewski, iSchool research fellow and assistant professor in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Central Florida, will deliver the 2019 Gryphon Lecture on Friday, March 8, at the iSchool. Sponsored annually by The Center for Children's Books (CCB), the lecture features a leading scholar in the field of youth and literature, media, and culture. It is free and open to the campus and public.
In "Taking a Teen-Centric Approach to Adolescent Online Safety," Wisniewski will discuss her research into understanding adolescent online risk experiences and how teens cope with these risks, challenging some of the assumptions that have been made about how to protect teens online.
My research shows that parents are often not authoritative figures when it comes to the risks their teens are experiencing online; thus, an over-reliance on parental mediation to ensure teen online safety may be problematic. Thus, we may want to move toward new approaches that empower teens by enhancing their risk-coping, resilience, and self-regulatory behaviors, so that they can learn to more effectively protect themselves from online risks.
Wisniewski graduated from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte with a PhD in computing and information systems and was a post-doctoral scholar at the Pennsylvania State University. She has over six years of industry experience as a systems developer/business analyst in the IT industry. Wisniewski's research interests are situated at the juxtaposition of HCI, social computing, and privacy. Her goal is to frame privacy as a means to not only protect end users, but more importantly, to enrich online social interactions that individuals share with others. Her research has been featured by popular news media outlets, including ABC News, NPR, Psychology Today, and U.S. News and World Report.
The lecture, which will be recorded, will begin at 7:00 p.m. in Room 126 of the iSchool. A reception will follow in the East Foyer.