Digital Education and Learning Group

The Digital Education and Learning Group is part of the Centre for Teacher Education at the University of Vienna. The group researches and teaches the interplay of education and digitality using a creative, person-centered, optimistic, but also technology-critical and value-oriented approach. The group's goal is to promote inclusive digital learning experiences that take into account diverse realities of life and issues such as sustainability and social justice. These learning experiences also open up individual spaces for playful exploration, learning, and growth.

The group engages in a critical socio-technical discourse around education and digitality in its teaching, research, and outreach activities. Our aim is to support the self-empowering use of digital technology and to promote a capacity for action through which people can actively participate in the digitized society. 

The group’s Computational Empowerment Lab was founded to provide both a physical space and an intellectual framework for the realization of these goals. In collaboration with its users, the Computational Empowerment Lab combines applied research and teaching. To this end, we employ exploratory and creative approaches to technologies such as digital fabrication, gaming, virtual and augmented reality, digital musical instruments, and robotics.

In the Computational Empowerment Lab we design educational technologies using participatory, user-centered methods. We combine qualitative and quantitative approaches from a range of academic disciplines to develop educational technologies and various modes of usage.

The team comprises multiple disciplinary backgrounds and brings together perspectives from computer science, especially human-computer interaction and game studies, educational sciences, social sciences, teacher education, philosophy and more. The Lab addresses researchers, students, pupils, teachers and the general public as well as stakeholders from education, politics and industry.