Gillian Andrews
Gillian Andrews has an unusual background as both a hacker and an educator, which makes her uniquely suited to offer people advice on how best to manage the media in their lives. A graduate of Teachers College, Columbia University, she put her academic experience to work in creating ‘The Media Show, an award-winning YouTube series which shares media and digital literacy insights with a young adult audience. Her dissertation and Google Academic Research fellowship explored why people have a hard time making sense of their web searches. She has taught media literacy and digital media skills at Marist College.
Dr Andrews hasn’t been surprised in the slightest by news that foreign intelligence agencies, advertisers and social media sites are exploiting everyday people’s data. As a former panelist on the digital rights radio show ‘Off The Hook’ and an organizer for the Hackers On Planet Earth conference, she has been tracking warnings about digital privacy and security issues for over a decade. In her user experience work for ThoughtWorks, Second Life, Simply Secure and the Open Internet Tools project, she has helped developers make systems easier for everyday people to use. She has written freelance for Salon.com, the Village Voice, .net Magazine, ReadWriteWeb and io9 in addition to publishing academic articles on media and digital literacy. She was anthologized in Bitch magazine's tenth anniversary collection ‘Bitchfest’. Her academic writing has been published in the Fibreculture Journal, E-Learning and Digital Media and the Teachers College Record.
