Keynote: Prof. Dr. Marcus Düwell

“Why should creativity have a role in Academia?”

Marcus Düwell (born in 1962) holds a chair for philosophical ethics at Utrecht University. He is director of the Ethics Institute of Utrecht University and director of the Utrecht Research Institute for Philosophy and Religious Studies. From 2005-2012 he was director of the Netherlands Research School for Practical Philosophy. Düwell studied Philosophy, German Literature and Theology in Tübingen and Munich. His PhD-thesis at the university of Tübingen was a philosophical investigation about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. From 1993-2001 he was academic coordinator of the Interdepartmental Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities at the University of Tübingen.

Our keynote-speaker, Marcus Duwëll, addressed the main topic of the Together we (re)search conference from his philosophical perspective, by exploring the question: should creativity be a part of academia? His message was clear; scientific facts need interpretation. And for interpretation, creativity, such as being able to see other perspectives, is needed. The interpretation of the facts, should then be clearly and especially, coherently communicated to the public. In a world full of doubt and alternative facts, the academia is obligated to the public to be coherent in their interpretation of scientific work.

Workshops:

Dr. Jaap Bos: Research Ethics (Eijkmankamer)

Jaap Bos (1961) studied theoretical and historical psychology in Groningen and Utrecht. In 1997 he finished his PhD dissertation on argumentation and debates in the history of psychoanalysis. He is has an interest in historiography and theory of the social sciences, and in communication studies.

The past ten or fifteen years it has become increasingly clear that science as a project is vulnerable to all sorts of contaminating influences, such as ‘perverse incentives’, sloppy practices, fraud and conflicting interests. The effects of these influences can be devastating, yet in scientific education little attention is paid to them. The two workshops on research ethics are part on an ongoing project titled ‘Do the wrong thing’, aimed at problematizing some of these practices.

In the first workshop we shall play the game of plagiarism. You will learn to become an excellent plagiarist and earn points for every time you succeed in getting away with ‘stolen sentences’. However, you also become a good detective, and earn point for detecting plagiarism. The aim of this game is to become sensitive to the problem of plagiarism.

In the second workshop we discuss three real life case studies of ‘falsifying data’. We follow students and researchers in their struggle with unwilling data (data that refuse to fit the model) and their quest for success. How to cope with the seductions of science? The aim of this workshop is to become sensitive to the various choices that must be made in the process of research.

Dr. Félice van Nunspeet: Psychophysiological methods to implicate in cognitive processes (Kernkampkamer)

Félice van Nunspeet completed a Research Master in Developmental Psychology at Leiden University (2009), and graduated on a project about the neural underpinnings of social decision-making in adolescents. In 2014, she successfully defended her dissertation titled ‘Neural correlates of the motivation to be moral’, and she continued to work within the Leiden Social and Organizational Psychology Unit as a post-doc. As of September 2016, Félice is an assistant professor at the Social, Health, and Organizational Psychology department at Utrecht University.

In my research, in the field of social psychology, I examine people’s motivation to adhere to moral group norms and their personal moral values. However, since people may not always be able or willing to report their attitudes about moral issues or intentions, I take a psychophysiological and neuroscientific approach to examine people’s (implicit) behavioral tendencies and the cognitive processes underlying these inclinations. In this workshop I will let you experience such a behavioral measure and I will show you how measuring event-related brain potentials can tell us more about people’s motivation to be moral.

Dr. Ellen Kok: Eye Tracking (Westerdijkkamer)

Ellen Kok is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Education at Utrecht University. Her main focus is on learning complex visual tasks, and she has a particular interest in the use of eye-tracking methodology. Her PhD thesis was entitled ‘Developing visual expertise. From shades of grey to diagnostic reasoning in radiology’. In addition to (visual) expertise and instructional design, she has an interest in metacognition.

We tend to measure ‘learning’ by its outcome: a higher grade, a better test score. However, learning is more than an outcome, it’s a process, it’s about how we interact with learning materials. But learning processes are notoriously hard to measure, not the least because we tend to have trouble verbalizing them. Fortunately, more and more research focusses on process measures of learning, that aim to investigate the learning process and how it relates to learning outcomes.

I’ll demonstrate a process measure called ‘eye tracking’. An eye tracker is basically a camera that measures the movements of the eyes,  to see what a person is looking at, for how long, and in what order. This information can be used to investigate learning processes. For example, did the learner pay attention to the important information? How do teachers and learners differ in the way they look at learning materials? Can we teach learners to look in the same manner as experts do?

In this workshop, I will provide a basic introduction into eye tracking, and show what kind of educational research is conducted with this technique. Furthermore, I’ll bring a mobile eye tracker to show what an eye tracker looks like, and how it works.

Melle Smets: Department of Search, where art and science create debatable futures (Opzoomerkamer)

The Department of Search, Melle Smets, Cynthia Hathaway and Carlijn Diesfeldt, two artists and a curator, put their passion into developing cooperation between scientists and artists. From experience they understand its ins and outs, how mutual understanding works, and how this opens minds. Because of this, given an interesting set of circumstances, such as a university campus, they are capable of ‘mining’ whatever the inhabitants are taking for granted in their surroundings. There the Department is bound to find themes, ideas, questions and perspectives that will tickle everyone’s imagination and evoke fresh universal interest. Doors will be opened, and new contacts will be established, new activities will deploy, on and off campus.

In this workshop, you will be challenged to think out of the box. How can artistic methods help you to get creative ideas? Zero Footprint Campus can help you enhance these ideas, and give structure to this process.