ScienceCampus Tübingen: Informational Environments

Description

As lifelong and life encompassing processes, human development, learning, and education are no longer restricted to formal and institutional contexts. The advent of the Internet brought about a wealth of information that is at the disposal of learners anywhere and anytime. The "information diet" that a learner employs for educational purposes results in an "informational environment" that may differ from the informational environments of other learners.

Informational environments feature a number of core characteristics that have an impact on processes of human development, learning and education: a) an enormous diversity of information; b) innovations in displaying information; and c) a social embedment of learning processes. These core characteristics interact with the repertoire of skills that learners dispose of their educational processes. Pivotal research questions arise regarding an understanding of barriers as well as affordances of informational environments for learning processes, and in respect of the analysis of medial and instructional design aspects that support human development, learning, and education in formal and informal contexts.

The WissenschaftsCampus Tübingen is a cross-disciplinary research network connecting all research areas and labs of KMRC, several institutes of the University of Tuebingen, and external partner institutions from Freiburg and Mannheim. Research in this network revolves around three lines of investigation, each of which addresses one of the core characteristics of informational environments.

Informational Diversity and Informational Conjunction

This line of research studies the ways that learners deal with an environment consisting of diverse, and sometimes conflicting, pieces of information. One of the research topics revolves around the question of how learners from diverse cognitive, socio-economical, or disciplinary backgrounds arrange their informational environment, and how patterns of use are related to educational outcomes. A second research topic addresses the ways that learners deal with informational diversity. In this area, skills of information evaluation, information search and information integration are investigated. A third research topic deals with the question of how formal educational institutions can adapt to the global changes in informational infrastructure.

Informational Setup and Informational Presentation

In this line of research the impact of the design of informational resources on processes of human development, learning, and education is investigated. One of the research topics addresses the question of how an entertaining presentation ("edutainment") of information influences acceptance and learning outcomes. In a second research topic, the effectiveness of static and dynamic visualizations across various informal learning contexts is examined. A third research topic is about the pre-processing and visualization of large amounts of data (e.g. about stock market fluctuations) in ways that enable adaptive user behavior in real time.

Informational Exchange and Informational Construction

Human development, learning, and education are often embedded into cooperative and collaborative contexts. This line of research investigates the social nature of informational environments. One of the research topics deals with communities - social structures defined by a common interest among people. Both in offline and online contexts communities exert a strong influence on how people deal with educational topics, but for online communities these mechanisms are not that well understood. A second topic of research is about the general ways that cognitive (e.g. collaborative learning) and social mechanisms (e.g., power issues) are shaped in online scenarios. A third research topic revolves around the analysis of technological, social, and cognitive terms that lead learners to actively contribute content elements, thereby participating in the construction of new informational environments and resources.

Cooperations

• University of Tuebingen
  • Institute of Education
  • Institute of Psychology
  • Institute of Sociology
  • Institute of Sports Science
  • Ludwig-Uhland-Institute for Empirical Cultural Studies
  • Medical Faculty
  • Wilhelm-Schickard-Institute of Informatics
• External affiliates:
  • University of Freiburg
  • University of Education Freiburg
  • Centre for European Economic Research Mannheim