News

The Knowledge Media Reseach Center wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year with thanks for your faithful cooperation.

On December 5th, Dr. Manuela Glaser did a guest seminar within the course on "Hybrid Documentaries" offered at the Sint-Lukas Brussels University College of Art and Design in Brussels. Dr. Glaser talked about "Hybrid documentary formats: How entertaining elements in archaeological television documentaries influence processing, experience, and knowledge acquisition".

Manuela Glaser explained various entertaining characteristics of hybrid documentary formats and their influence on recipients' cognitive processing, experience, and knowledge acquisition.

On December 1st, Dr. Devin G. Ray delivered an invited talk, “Boundary Conditions and Process Mechanisms of Recognition Bias”, to the Department of Psychology at the University of Lancaster in the UK.

Dr. Ray discussed his ongoing work on recognition bias, the reliable tendency for people to recognize others who share their ethnic or social groups better than others who do not share their ethnic and social groups. This work attempts to understand the natural circumstances in which recognition bias will disappear as well as the implications of different limiting conditions for process explanations of this phenomenon.

How can teachers make effective use of digital technologies in their teaching? How can they use digital tools to enhance student learning? What do they need to know to be able to do so? And, what can research tell us about how to answer these questions in order to help teachers acquire the necessary professional knowledge and to develop the necessary professional skills?

The international workshop aims at initiating a discussion on "Knowledge and Skills related to Digital Tools for Teaching and Teacher Training - Cognitive Processes involved in Teachers’ Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK)". The workshop will take place at the Knowledge Media Research Center in Tuebingen, Germany, on October 25th.

For further information please refer to the conference web site.

At this year's ECER Conference in Berlin, Prof. Hesse, Knowledge Media Research Center Tuebingen, Germany, highlighted the importance of collaborative problem solving skills to meet the educational challenges of the 21st century.

Collaborative problem solving can be conceptualized as a mixture of social and cognitive problem solving skills. The social (collaborative) part refers to the way the groups coordinate their activities and is related to sub-skills, e-g., participation, perspective taking and social regulation.

ECER 2011 dealt with Urban Education. The conference took place from September 13th to 16th 2011 in Berlin.