Topic: Digitalisation

Managing digitalisation

Digitalisation is a process that is affecting all areas of life and work, involving scientific infrastructures as well as services and administrations. It is a "revolution" that will also change life in our cities. In Korea and China, for example, "smart cities" already exist that are already gaining attention as models of urban planning and development and raise the crucial question of how we want (or should?) live in the future.

However one may think about these developments – the fact that one has to deal with them reasonably seems to be beyond question. Because digitalisation is not an end in itself. It is neither destiny nor blind automatism, nor should it be taken as such. On the contrary, digitalisation must be managed. And this involves coming to an agreement on the challenges, opportunities and problems of digital technologies and exchanging ideas, particularly in the House of Science..

As in previous years, the FiF intends to continue to encourage such critical self-reflection in its events

Events on the topic digitalisation

The topic“Digital Humanities” continues the previous focus on “Educational Informatics”

with new thematic aspects. Digitalisation creates new challenges for the humanities in particular and is changing the way scientific research and publications are made. Digitalised text corpora must be made available with sense and understanding if they want to be more than just simple text masses. This is why – in the cooperation of computer science, linguistics and philosophy – techniques of knowledge processing and discourse analysis must be established in order to make digitalised text corpora accessible. Cognitive systems that can support decision-making processes in a variety of fields – medicine, finance, politics – are also in the focus of research. FiF will support these research activities with a series of workshops.

Educational Informatics

With the focal point Educational Informatics, the goal was to establish and systematically develop different fields of research at the TU Darmstadt. This was supported by various workshops organized by the FiF in cooperation with the Department of Computer Science and the German Institute for Educational Research (DIPF).

What does Educational Informatics mean?

The name Educational Informatics is a new word developed in analogy to familiar terms like medical informatics, bioinformatics etc. Educational informatics focuses on the theoretical principles, the tools and methods as well as the application of IT-based tools to educational research questions. This includes the automated research, computer-aided design, indexing, preparation and presentation of education-related information and research data for a variety of user groups: Educational researchers, students, parents, (future) teachers and decision-makers in the field of education.