ECDF Professor Elisabeth Mayweg was officially appointed to a W3 professorship at HU Berlin on January 1, 2025. She takes over the chair for media education in schools and universities. The appointment underlines Elisabeth Mayweg’s commitment to interdisciplinary research in the field of digital media education.
“I am very pleased to be able to continue researching and teaching at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in the future. During my time as a junior professor at the ECDF and at the HU Berlin, I was able to carry out many interdisciplinary projects. I would like to continue this collaboration in the area of AI and education in the future.” Elisabeth Mayweg will remain associated with the ECDF with the project “Digital communication and skills acquisition at universities” until May 2025, and then as an associated scientist.
Mayweg studied psychology at the University of Münster and subsequently received her doctorate and habilitation there. From 2018 until her current appointment to the W3 professorship, she was a junior professor in the area of “digital knowledge management in study and teaching” at the Institute for Educational Sciences at the HU Berlin and the ECDF. The professorship was donated by the Commerzbank Foundation. The new professorship “media education in schools and universities” is a professorship financed by the senate in order to expand cross-sectional topics in teacher training, especially in the area of media education: “Due to fast-moving technological developments, especially in the area of AI, it is more important than ever to enable people to deal with innovative technologies in a critical, reflective and therefore competent manner”, says Mayweg. Learners should be able to use technologies constructively and be able to foresee the potential as well as the risks (such as biases): “This is particularly relevant to society, as the focus here must be primarily on democratic thinking and action.”
Her research focuses on learning and teaching under the conditions of digitality. She explores potential challenges and changes in learning and (future) working environments and how learners deal with them. Elisabeth Mayweg primarily wants to gain insights into how designers of educational contexts (e.g. teachers at schools or teachers at universities) can reflect on the potential of digital media in their work and use it to promote learning. In addition, she also deals with social-, media- and educational-psychological issues, for example in the context of digitally supported collaborative learning and argumentation or the handling of scientific information in the digital world.
During her time as a junior professor at the ECDF, Elisabeth Mayweg worked on various interdisciplinary projects, including the AI-SKILLS and DIALLS projects: The aim of AI-SKILLS is to support teachers in teaching students from all disciplines, primarily from non-technical subjects, the subject-specific examination of AI methods and technologies in university teaching in a research-related and application-oriented manner; In the international collaborative project DIALLS, dialogue and argumentation techniques were taught to students with the help of open access resources developed as part of the project, which promote cooperation through tolerant, empathetic and inclusive behavior.