Prof. Dr Ulrike Cress Gives Keynote Speech at GEBF 2022

‘Back to the Start – Education in the Digital Transformation’ is the slogan under which the 9^th Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Empirische Bildungsforschung (Society for Empirical Educational Research, GEBF) is being held from 9 to 11 March. The virtual event is dedicated to the conflictual interplay between education and digitalisation. It is organised by the University of Bamberg and the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi). Prof. Dr Ulrike Cress kicked off the event with a keynote speech on ‘”Knowledge” in the Digital Age’, in which the IWM director discussed processes of knowledge participation.

"Knowledge is generated in self-organised social communities that decide for themselves what is true. This then also shapes the perspective of their members," Cress explained. This results in a co-evolution in which individual learning and collaborative knowledge construction go hand in hand. According to Cress, this applies to ‘serious’ knowledge communities like Wikipedia as well as to advocates of conspiracy theories. To cope with these many ‘truths’, citizens should learn to scrutinise and categorise knowledge systems: "Education in the digital world does not consist of training people how to use digital tools. We should rather focus on the complex social and cognitive processes that shape the way we deal with a multitude of postulated truths," says the educational researcher. In her view, knowledge of one's own ignorance and trust in epistemic authorities are also important educational goals.

Around 600 national and international educational researchers virtually attended the opening of the event, for which around 600 conference papers were submitted.