News archive

In December Prof. Dr. Katharina Scheiter, head of the Multiple representations Lab at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, was elected to the editorial board of the journal Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft (ZfE) for the subject area of digital literacy. The ZfE is a representative forum for the entire discipline of educational science and publishes highly rated, peer-reviewed articles on current developments in educational science, making the findings of interdisciplinary research accessible to all those with a professional interest in the field. The ZfE is published on a quarterly basis by the Wiesbaden publishing house~VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

„Cognitive conflict in Science: Demonstrations in what scientists talk about and study.“
The concept of cognitive conflict, that being two competing ideas in the brain at the same time, encompasses a large number of instantiations throughout Psychology, even playing an important role in many philosophies considering how science works best. This experience of cognitive conflict is widely considered to be aversive, but also motivating, for individuals across a wide range of contexts. Overall, the results suggest that scientists talk more when they disagree, and that they speak more about threats to the group and individual. Most generally the results can be thought of as an indication of what science is actually about, i.e., reducing uncertainty and solving problems, and that general psychological principles can be applied within the context of science to understand how science works, and how science should work.

Brett Buttliere has been working as a research assistant under Prof. Dr. Dr. Friedrich W. Hesse and Dr. Jürgen Buder in the Knowledge Exchange Lab to investigate online knowledge exchange, and especially the role that cognitive conflict plays in this process. The goal of his research is to develop and apply fundamental psychological technologies to help individuals lead better lives (e.g., trying to improve the efficiency of science).

„Influencing appraisals of emotional valence with spatial touchscreen interactions: An embodied approach to Positive Technology“ 

​(Sergio Cervera Torres & Peter Gerjets)

Could bodily interactions with touchscreen interfaces influence users’ affective experiences? This present dissertation investigates, from an embodied perspective, the potential of touchscreen interfaces as “positive technologies”. Positive Technology is an emergent research area within the fields of Cyberpsychology and Human-Computer Interaction interested in examining and promote the quality of user’s affective experiences. However, despite touchscreens enable the manipulation of digital contents directly with the hands, very little is known about how such physical interaction may influence users’ affectivity. This question was approached from theory and research on embodied cognition, which postulate that perception and action influence cognitive and emotional functioning.

Torres is Associated PhD candidate at the Multimodal Interaction Lab of the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) and the LEAD Graduate School & Research Network of the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen.

Citizens create knowledge; nature lovers gather valuable information about our domestic flora and fauna day after day. The online accessible data help scientists to make more precise assumptions about the habitat and distributions of different species. In order to inspire even more people to capture biodiversity, scientists of the Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde (IfL) and the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) together with the Dachverband Deutscher Avifaunisten (DDA) are designing a new generation of interactive online maps for the ornithological web portal ornitho.de.

Press  release

At the “Games and Learning Alliance conference” last week, the new board of the Serious Games Society was elected for a two year team. The members of the board are Francesco Bellotti (president), Manuel Ninaus of the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM), Remco C. Veltkamp and Jannicke Baalsrud Hauge (see image from left to right).

The Serious Games Society was born from the GALA Network of Excellence, a multidisciplinary consortium of 30 partners from all over the EU. It comprised universities, research centres and large enterprises. The SGS has been designed to bring together the cutting edge companies, institutions and individuals researching on and developing Serious Games. It annually organizes a conference including the Serious Game Awards and publishes its own journal.

Under what circumstances does cooperative research succeed? How can the chances of success be increased  for interdisciplinary projects? These questions were discussed yesterdayin the Leibniz Salon "Cooperative Research and Interdisciplinarity". The Director of the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) Prof. Dr. Ulrike Cress debated with Leibniz colleagues from archaeology, history, biology, medicine and chemistry. Cooperative research and interdisciplinary exchange on scientifically and socially relevant questions are a special claim of the Leibniz Association and its institutes. This session of the Leibniz Salon was also the farewell to Christiane Neumann, the Secretary General of the Leibniz Association.

We can hardly imagine life without the internet as a search tool: whether at school, at work or for recreation. If it were a library, the internet would be the largest library in the world – with millions of shelves stacked with endless amounts of books, texts, CDs and films. And yet how can we get to grips with all of this if we want to learn something? How do we search for information when we want to know something and learn about it? What type of search process leads us to which goal? What action do we take when we want to find certain information on a particular topic, and what significance does information search have when learning? Search engines, link lists, wikis and video portal all offer search assistance.

As key issue of the workshops the participating project groups asked for the topic of data protection. About 20 participants of all funding programs as well as the e-teaching.org-team gained insight into the basics and practical aspects of the new General Data Protection Regulations of the EU. Prof. Dr. Tobias Keber, professor of media law and media politics from the faculty of Electronic Media at Stuttgart Media University, explained in his lecture which data protection regulations must be taken into account when implementing innovative digitalization projects at universities from 25th May 2018. Afterwards, the requirements of the new regulations for the development and use of digitals tools were discussed. Prof. Dr. Sacher Paulus, professor for IT security at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Mannheim, demonstrated, how privacy requirements can be realized in the process of software development and during ongoing operations. Both speakers presented descriptively the legal or technical topic as well as its practical consequences and pointed out courses of action. In an extensive discussion and Q&A session, both lecturers offered expert help and advice on current problems and questions of the projects.

On November 30^th members of ten digitalization projects from Universities in Baden-Württemberg met for a joint workshop day at the IWM as part of the MWK funding program “Digital Innovations for Smart Teaching - Better Learning”. The program “Smart Teaching BW” which is based on the IWM accompanies and supports the projects and their sustainable development. For this purpose it organizes regularly joint workshops during the project term of two years. The workshops provide a networking space for the project groups and universities where they are informed about relevant current issues and are encouraged to discuss them.

Movement and orientation in space is an everyday experience. But it is also a fundamental theoretical problem for science. How does a moving observer perceive the relative movement between two other persons or objects?

Despite its everyday relevance, this "perceptual three-body problem" is largely unexplored. Dr. Tobias Meilinger from the department of Prof. Bülthoff at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biological Cybernetics and Dr. Bärbel Garsoffky and Prof. Dr. Stephan Schwan from the Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media (IWM) examined under which circumstances the perception of movement is distorted - and thus an illusion arises.

Meilinger, T., Garsoffky, B., & Schwan, S. (2017). A catch-up illusion arising from a distance-dependent perception bias in judging relative movement. Scientific Reports, 7: 17037. DOI:10.1038/s41598-017-17158-8

It is all about the topic of an "open culture in times of artificial intelligence" at the conference OPEN! in Stuttgart today. One question will be whether artificial intelligence (AI) can replace creative people in the future. The basic assumption is that AI will definitely change work, creative industries, art and culture. Prof. Dr. Ulrike Cress, director of the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) and head of the Knowledge construction Lab participates in the panel discussion "AI – catalyst or enemy of an open society?" She will, amongst others things, report on "Cognitive Interfaces" as they are researched in the Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus “Cognitive Interfaces” (WCT) of the IWM. The research network focusses on interfaces that expand, not narrow, the human horizon. Cress adds: "Artificial intelligence should show us patterns. We, the people, should draw the conclusions, not the machines." Further members of the discussion include Peter H. Ganten (Chairman OSB Alliance), Prof. Dipl.-Des. Jo Wickert (user generated design GmbH) and Dominika Szope (ZKM-Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe). 

The self-description of the conference - https://www.openkonferenz.de/ueber-uns/: "OPEN! is the event for digitization. It identifies challenges and provides solutions for how to increase productivity and innovation in a data-driven world based on the principles of an "open culture". The OPEN! provides a 360° perspective and looks at both the economy and public administration, science and research, cultural and creative industries and civil society“. The conference is organized by the MFG Baden-Württemberg and the OSB Alliance eV., supported by the Ministry of Science, Research and Arts - Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg.

Since 2017, Leonie Jacob has been a PhD student at the IWM in the Multiple representations Lab of Prof. Dr. Katharina Scheiter. She will be giving a seminar called "Chances and Risks of Digital Media for Children and Adolescents" for students training to be teachers at the University of Tübingen on three weekends in December. Jacob wants to make it easier for the students to strengthen young people's media literacy in their classes and to feel competent handling digital media: "Media literacy is enormously important in our society. Writing e-mails or doing research on the internet is only a small part of this and an indispensable part of most professions. Since digital media are already used by almost every child in Germany in everyday life, it is very important that they learn media competence, which is important not only for individual development, but also for the prevention of risks of digital media. Media literacy has long been considered a key skill and should be acquired at school. This requires well-trained teachers who have a high level of media literacy themselves. I offer prospective teachers in my seminar the possibility to become aware of the opportunities and risks of digital media. The feeling that students can apply their knowledge later in their lessons and pass it on to their future students motivates me to give as good a seminar as I can. With the use of digital media, the awareness of its possibilities and limitations and the design of prevention lessons, the students should gain a deeper insight into the use of digital media and strengthen their own media literacy. In addition, the seminar enables me to implement newly researched and proven teaching and learning methods and gives me hope that this will make the seminar more exciting and sustainable.” 

The seminar will partly take place at the IWM's TüDiLab, where digital media can be used directly and partly at the Faculty of Education. It is an offer of the Tübingen School of Education (TüSe) for students training to be teachers.

On an interactive multi-touch table LEGO bricks are used to create musical patterns. In this way musical as well as mathematical abilities of elementary learners fostered. The table and the corresponding course „Listening to Math“ were demonstrated in Glasgow at the International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI). Out of a total of 19 demonstrations only two were awarded. Jennifer Müller, Associate PhD student at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) is excited: "It was very impressive. There was a robot to support emotion detection for autistic people." What is so special about the Lego-Table is that it has been developed in a multidisciplinary way. For example, teachers and composers were involved in the course concept development. The software for the table was developed by Dr. Uwe Oestermeier from the software development department of the IWM. The effectiveness of the course is studied by psychologists. Müller says about the peculiarity of the course concept: "If you want to use multimodal technologies in the classroom, then you need to work with teachers, psychologists, computer scientists, education researchers and others. In order for teachers to be able to use multimodal technologies effectively in the classroom, suitable methods need to be developed as well."

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Aileen Oeberst, Dr. Annika Scholl und Dr. Dr. Elise Klein vom Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) have been named by the Leibniz Gemeinschaft to join AcademiaNet – the Expert Database for Outstanding Women in Academia. The Robert Bosch Stiftung, in cooperation with Spektrum der Wissenschaft (Nature Publishing Group), has set up this exclusive expert database in 2010. It is the only web site of its kind that shows profiles exclusively of outstandingly qualified women who are best in their field. They all have been nominated by highly recognized science and research institutions. To date, more than 2.000 profiles of female top-class researchers of all disciplines are in the database.

Under the main theme "The role of science in a post fact society" the European Parliament opens its doors to the Science Meets Parliaments - the flagship initiative of the Joint Research Centre (JRC).
The Brussels Week will take place for the sixth time from November 28 to 30 2017, bringing together members of the European Parliament and European scientists. The aim of the mutual exchange is to build mutual understanding and to establish a long-term cooperation between politics and science. Prof. Dr. Sonja Utz from the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) is one of the selected scientists this year. She will accompany Dr. Paul Rübig (Österreichische Volkspartei and Deputy Chairman of STOA - Science and Technology Options Assessment) for two days, participating in all of his appointments and meetings. Prof. Dr. Sonja Utz examines in her ERC project the impact of social media on life satisfaction, civic engagement and information benefits in a professional context and looks forward to her stay in Brussels: "This is a unique opportunity to gain insight into political decision-making processes and to present my own research results to decision-makers. Communication on social media takes place across borders; the discussion on possible regulations should therefore also take place at European level."

In the debate about digital media in teaching, it is often about the question of whether digital media are conducive to the learning process. But instead of dwelling on this question, at this year's Campus Innovation, Gabriele Irle will give a lecture that focuses on the impact of digital media and the reasons why and how digital media can be effective . "I think that a further development in research and practice of digital teaching is only possible if the modes of action of the learning process with digital media are known. In my lecture I will present the framework model that was developed in the project "Digital Learning Map 2020", which attempts to classify and illustrate the existing theory and empiricism on impact factors. In addition, I show preliminary results of our literature study, which illustrates how differently learning success can be defined. Our research will be applied in the best-practice-database I have outlined, which will make the practical knowledge in Germany visible within the area of digital teaching."

The Campus Innovation is organized annually by the Multimedia Kontor Hamburg and addresses decision-makers and creative thinkers from universities, politics and business, lecturers, administrative staff and students. Under the title "Digitization as a megatrend - what does Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Virtual Reality mean for universities?", the 15th Campus Innovation is expecting more than 800 participants in Curio-Haus Hamburg on November 23 and 24 2017.

One topic of the future is the opportunities and risks of teaching and learning in the digital school. The main question is what teachers in the future will need – be it special school materials or their own abilities in dealing with new media. In his presentation Jun.-Prof. Dr. Andreas Lachner presents the current empirical status of digitization in the school sector as well as empirically-tested application possibilities of digital media in the classroom.

 „Digital education is one of the most challenging goals of our time. Therefore, the question arises how school and education can contribute to the digital education of adolescents, and what opportunities exist to use digital media in school and teaching. In this lecture, the current problematic of digitization in school and teaching will be discussed and effective application scenarios of digital media will be shown," says Lachner about the background of his lecture. Andreas Lachner is junior professor for learning and teaching with digital media at the University of Tübingen, and associated researcher at the Multiple Representations Lab at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien. The lecture series on the future of teacher education and school, organized by the Tübingen School of Education, is part of the Studium Generale series of the University of Tübingen and runs until February 2018. The series focuses on the social integration of teacher education and school, their future challenges and their educational research.

The project meeting for the Eurostars project Dr. TIDE - Digital Research Information Detector - is being held on November 14and 15. In this project, in cooperation with the Norwegian company Scan4News and the company ec4u (formerly InsightDimensions) a business intelligence tool is being developed, which allows the integration of external information and enables the visualization of the results of complex analyzes. The IWM subproject investigates how creating visualizations affects the understanding of complex data and decision-making.

Dr. Yvonne Kammerer has been a part-time Assistant Professor at the Welten Institute of the Open University of the Netherlands since November. The Welten Institute is the research center for learning, teaching and technology of the Open University of the Netherlands. She will continue to work at the IWM as Postdoc.

Digitization of the world - this is the headline of the conference "Fünftes Sankelmarker Gespräch zur Lehrerbildung - Fifth Sankelmarker Talk on Teacher Education" from November 10th to 11th. The talks are about the current challenges of digitization for school and teacher training. The participants are experts from the areas of higher education, educational administration, teacher training institutes and professional associations. The aim is to discuss how electronic media are changing world perceptions, which products, technologies and concepts are currently playing a role in schools and teaching and which trends are recognizable. Ulrike Cress of the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) will speak on the podium "Learning / E-Learning" today, the subject of her talk is what digital media can do and change in schools. She is the director of the IWM, head of the Knowledge Construction Lab and a full professor at the University of Tübingen, department of psychology. "The public discussion about media in schools is very complex. It's not about more or less technology, but about understanding the variety of applications", says Cress.

The "Sankelmarker Gespräche zur Lehrerbildung - Sankelmarker Talks on Teacher Education" are a series of conferences that has been taking place since 2009. This year, the fifth episode will be held at the European University in Flensburg. The objective of the conference: "Creating space for discussing fundamental problems of teacher education and the teaching profession - if possible beyond daily political issues – in a differentiated and intense way among experts."

Today, the spread of information through digitization is enormously facilitated while at the same time the willingness to accept facts without verifying them thoroughly seems to be increasing. Since scientific knowledge plays an increasingly important role in our everyday lives and the number and complexity of to-be-faced problems is growing, so is the relevance of a public understanding of the challenges tob e overcome is growing, so does the relevance of a general understanding of scientific issues. From global warming, for example, to medical insights: a well-informed and critical reflective public is important for political and social developments and decisions.N² – the Network of Networks comprising the Max Planck PhDnet, the Helmholtz Juniors and the Leibniz PhD Network – is therefore organizing an event in ordert o inspire and prepare young researchers to take responsibility for communicating their science.
Our junior researchers Carolin Burmeister of the Knowledge Construction Lab, Steffen Gottschling of the Multimodal Interaction Lab, Irina Brich and Inga Marie Bause - members of the Knowledge Exchange Lab at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) - will be at the conference in Berlin from November 6-8. Inga Marie Bause has been a research associate and PhD student at the IWM since January 2015: „As part of the organization team I am looking forward to a somewhat different conference, with lots of creative input and unconventional approaches to communicate science in order to increase the public understanding and critical reflection of scientific findings.“
Part of the conference takes place within the context of the Berlin Science week. On the first day the public is invited to join in under the motto “Science Beyond Borders” in the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. In addition to lectures and presentations, a Science Lounge will provide an opportunity to talk to researchers, to view the artworks of the “Beyond Curie” project and to learn more about „Knowledge Link through Art and Science (KLAS)”. The remainder of the conference will take place on the EUREF Campus and will give over 200 PhD candidates from Leibniz, Helmholtz and MPG the chance to improve their science communication skills in workshops and presentations. Moreover, lectures and panel discussions will inform and encourage young researchers to engage in science communication as well as to develop visions for future directions of science communication.

"Factors influencing laypersons understanding of the fragility of new scientific findings in journalistic articles"

Scientific journal articles on the Internet provide an important source of information for  laypersons. However, the scientific findings reported therein are always fragile to a certain extent. To recognize and classify this fragility is difficult for laypersons, because they lack expert knowledge, which is why they are mainly dependent on the information available in the text. Moreover, a number of intrapersonal variables can distort the collection and processing of information - for example, the comments of other users who can influence the understanding of the text. How these factors interact and influence the fragility understanding of laypersons has been little researched so far. Danny Flemming investigated this in the BMBF project "Understanding of the tentativeness of medical findings in participative media environments“ and focused on the scientific understanding of laypersons, especially in the context of participative media formats (Web 2.0). Since September 2013 he has been a research scientist and a PhD student in the Knowledge Construction Lab of Prof. Dr. Ulrike Cress at the IWM.

Learning from multiple, that means several documents, is becoming more and more important in our digital society, for example when we try to get information about a science-related topic through the Internet. In order to form a solid picture of the facts addressed in the documents from our research, readers must critically evaluate, compare and integrate the various, possibly contradictory information. The research in the field of multiple document literacy (literacy = competency) is investigating these cognitive processes as well as the influencing factors of a competent handling of multiple documents. In the annual international workshop on Multiple Document Literacy, current research results on this subject are presented and discussed in 9 lectures and a poster presentation. The topics include, for example, how a training program influences the source assessment of pupils, the development of an instrument for measuring multiple document literacy, or strategies for dealing with multiple documents in pupils with or without dyslexia.

This year, the workshop will take place for the first time at the IWM from 26 to 27 October. Dr. Yvonne Kammerer is organizing the workshop. A total of about 30 researchers from 8 different countries (Norway, Finland, France, Spain, Italy, USA, Cyprus and Germany) will participate.

On July 1, 2017 the Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus Tübingen has begun a new research topic. It is the first nationwide Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus, which researched "Informational environments" from 2010 to 2016. In the current topic "Cognitive Interfaces" about 40 scientists are investigating in 14 projects how thinking, acting and working can be improved through the design of man-machine interfaces. Digital technologies allow for the creation of an interface, which gives access to an enormous variety of information in real time. This interface influences what we know, how we think, how we decide and how we behave. It is a "cognitive" interface because it can help people in their knowledge processes.
The Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus Tübingen is a research network jointly initiated by the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM) and the University of Tübingen. The aim is to create a closer and strategically oriented network in order to further develop the research into digital media in Tübingen and to strengthen the scientific environment for this topic.

Link: https://www.wissenschaftscampus-tuebingen.de/www/index.html

Are readers focusing on the original sources of the news they read? How or when are they trying to figure out who has said what? These questions are linked to current debates, which controversially discuss the Internet as a source for information.
Despite the importance of using and evaluating primary sources for learning from texts, little is known about the particular conditions that encourage sourcing during reading. Jason Braasch (University of Memphis) about the lecture: „Basic assumptions of the discrepancy-induced source comprehension (D-ISC) model are presented, which describes the moment-by-moment cognitive processes that readers undergo when reading-to-understand controversial messages. We then review supporting evidence from single and multiple text comprehension research. In the discussion, we draw conclusions based on the theoretical and empirical research, highlight limitations of what is known to date, and suggest how further investigations of D-ISC might address these concerns."
Jason Braasch is the founder of the D-ISC assumption model and therefore relevant in this area. The lecture opens the series "Cognitive Conflict Colloquium". The colloquium is organized every semester within the framework of the Postdoc network "Cognitive Conflicts During Media Use" of the Leibniz Institut für Wissensmedien. Its members present research on the subject of the network.

Interested guests are cordially invited, the lecture will be held in English.