PhD defense on Technological Responses to Distracting Media Multitasking in Digital Learning Environments

PhD defense on Technological Responses to Distracting Media Multitasking in Digital Learning Environments

Award, Higher Education, Learning Analytics, PhD defense, School, Self-Regulation
Today, we proudly acknowledge the remarkable achievement of our team member, Daniel Biedermann, in successfully defending his PhD thesis to become Dr. Biedermann. Woohoo, congratulations! In our modern world, the reality of digital distractions through the attention economy cannot be denied. Countries like the Netherlands, for instance, are planning to ban mobiles from classrooms starting from 2024. Daniel's PhD work centered on the complex challenges of digital media distraction, a phenomenon that's prevalent largely due to our pervasive use of social media and notification systems on our phones, PCs, and tablets. Presented in his disputation, Daniel argued the need for a context-sensitive system to gain a more profound understanding of digital media distraction. In addition, Daniel addressed the crucial subject of digital self-control tools (DSCTs). His research, which provided a…
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Best Short Paper Award Nomination @LAK23

Best Short Paper Award Nomination @LAK23

Award, Conference, Conference, Higher Education, Learning Analytics
The protection of students’ privacy in learning analytics (LA) applications is critical for cultivating trust and effective implementations of LA in educational environments around the world. However, students’ privacy concerns and how they may vary along demographic dimensions that historically influence these concerns have yet to be studied in higher education. Gender differences, in particular, are known to be associated with people's information privacy concerns, including in educational settings. Building on an empirically validated model and survey instrument for student privacy concerns, their antecedents and their behavioral outcomes, we investigate the presence of gender differences in students’ privacy concerns about LA. We conducted a survey study of students in higher education across five countries (N = 762): Germany, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and the United States. Using multiple regression analysis,…
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EC-TEL2022 best demo award goes to EduTec

EC-TEL2022 best demo award goes to EduTec

Award, Conference
The demo paper Superpowers in the Classroom: Hyperchalk is an Online Whiteboard for Learning Analytics Data Collection and the corresponding tool Hyperchalk by Lukas Menzel, Sebastian Gombert, Daniele Di Mitri and Hendrik Drachsler were awarded the best demo award at the European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning 2022. Hyperchalk allows hosting collaborative whiteboards which can be used to collaborate in real-time. It collects rich user data which can be used to conduct learning analytics. Hyperchalk was initially developed for the ALICE project.
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DGHD Nachwuchspreis for Joshua Weidlich

DGHD Nachwuchspreis for Joshua Weidlich

Award, Conference, Higher Education, PhD defense
At this year's DGHD2022 in Paderborn, the German Society for Higher Education Pedagogy (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Hochschuldidaktik: DGHD) awarded Dr. Joshua Weidlich for his dissertation on the topic of social presence in online distance education. Supervised by Prof. Dr. Theo Bastiaens, he conducted his dissertation at FernUniversität in Hagen, the largest distance education provider in Germany. The jury commended the scientific merits of advancing this line of research while also providing ample practical implications for higher education teaching. The dissertation is available online here and further information about the award will be published here.
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EARLI EFG Grant awarded

EARLI EFG Grant awarded

Award
The European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) offers an Emerging Field Group (EFG) funding scheme. The goal of the EFG initiative is to support the development of a research group focused on exploratory, innovative, and risk-taking research. EARLI supports the EFG over the course of a two-year period. See the following video for a short intro about EFG funding: [embed]https://youtu.be/P3ErXQdLU2U[/embed] This year, the EARLI EFG committee awarded funding to the "Social- and Telepresence in Online Social Learning" emerging field group, which consists of Emmy Vrieling Teunter (Open University, Netherlands), Kamakshi Rajagopal (KU Leuven, Belgium), Karel Kreijns (Open University, Netherlands), Maartje Henderikx (Open University, Netherlands), Derya Orhan Göksün (Adiyaman University, Turkey), and Joshua Weidlich (DIPF, Germany). The group will explore how perceptions of social-and telepresence are fostered in…
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Daniele Di Mitri becomes a fellow of the Johanna Quandt Young Academy

Daniele Di Mitri becomes a fellow of the Johanna Quandt Young Academy

Award
On Friday 29th of April, Dr Daniele Di Mitri has been awarded as a fellow of the Johanna Quandt Young Academy of Goethe University an organization that gathers early career researchers at Goethe University, TU Darmstadt, University of Mainz and collaborating institutes such as DIPF. The Johanna Quandt Young Academy is a  platform to share knowledge across disciplines and to learn about research approaches of other disciplines. It brings together young scientists and outstanding leaders of the international science community to debate about and generate new ideas and concepts for defined topics and formulate science-based solutions for the future development of society with the intention of forming a strong voice to impact university and global development through policy statements. The Award Ceremony featured welcome speeches by Prof. Dr Enrico Schleiff,…
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Young Scientist member at Global Young Academy (2022-27)

Young Scientist member at Global Young Academy (2022-27)

Award, Press
An honour and privilege, Dr. Jane Yau joins the Global Young Academy as a Young Scientist member, starting in June 2022 and serving a five-year term. As a passionate and dedicated researcher in Mobile Learning and Educational Technologies since 2003, this membership gives Jane the opportunity to align her research efforts and collaboratively with the other members of the Academy to (1) help tackle the current global educational crisis with school closures; (2) bridge the digital, educational, and curriculum gaps and (3) support the development of young scientists into science leaders of the future. Jane’s vision for improving the state of the sciences/research and the situation of young scientists/scholars worldwide is: “There needs to be a more balanced proportion of young female and male scientists (under 20) to act as…
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Team of EduTec and TBA Members Wins Runners-Up Prize @ NAEP Reading Automated Scoring Challenge

Team of EduTec and TBA Members Wins Runners-Up Prize @ NAEP Reading Automated Scoring Challenge

Artificial Intelligence, Assessment, Award, Computational Psychometrics, School
The NAEP Reading Automated Scoring Challenge was a competition which was held in late 2021 by the National Center for Education (USA). The goal was to evaluate the applicability of natural language processing methodology to the task of scoring of large scale constructed response assessment data. In addition to this, participating models were also required to be interpretable and free of algorithmic bias against different student demographics. The data set which was used to evaluate the systems consisted of responses from 4th and 8th grade school student to 20 different reading comprehension tasks. More than a dozen different teams from universities and private assessment companies submitted contributions. Out of these, 12 contributions, including ours, were selected as eligible with respect to interpretability and algorithmic fairness. These contributions were then ranked…
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AR4STEAM: Premiere of the documentary film and ceremonial conclusion of the project work

AR4STEAM: Premiere of the documentary film and ceremonial conclusion of the project work

Augmented Reality, Award, Digitalisation, Learning Design, Project, School, Team, Workshop
Today we celebrated the successful completion of our joint project work between school and research institute in the innovative STE(A)M labs on an augmented reality (AR) apps and STEM learning. The DIPF and the Adorno Gymnasium in Frankfurt set out to develop and learn STEM topics with AR. The result of this innovative STEM Lab is a great app developed together and a documentary film on the process and results. We celebrate this with the presentation of AR Creator certificates for all students and teachers and 2 tablets, which the project team gives to the school as a thank you for the great cooperation and spirited joint works on the future of learning! The project was a true success. See for yourself. 
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EduTec member Dana Kube awarded role model from the women network “net4tec”

EduTec member Dana Kube awarded role model from the women network “net4tec”

Award
This week, Dana Kube has been chosen as a role model from the women network "net4tec". As a feminst Dana thinks, we should all know at least 5 names of great women every time we are asked to recommend someone for a position. "Let's celebrate women* and their work in our field and make digital feminism a premise for us and future generations!" Dana is an EduTec member since 2019 working with augmented reality apps for STEM education in an EU school project. She supports the EduTec group and Goethe University wiht establishing artificial intelligence in education at German HEIs.
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