Red-ink doctoral school (in progress)

red-ink stands for Rethinking Education in the Knowledge Society – a challenging and important task for our doctoral students!

The red-ink doctoral school has the goal of understanding the complex issues related to the introduction, management and impact of educational technologies and eLearning in the perspective of the new context of the knowledge society.

To this purpose, red-ink federates three Swiss universities in order to establish an outstanding multidisciplinary research team at National level, with expected international visibility and impact. The partners are the Università della Svizzera italiana, Universität St. Gallen, and the EPFL.

The red-ink doctoral school is funded by the pro*doc program of the Swiss National Research Fund. The pro*doc program is aimed to the education of highly qualified junior researchers in the social sciences, and is an excellence program in Switzerland.

Visit the red-ink website.

Schmeil Andreas (PhD student)

Andreas holds a German Master’s degree in Computer Science from Ulm University. His research at the NewMinE Lab focuses on Visual Collaboration and Learning Practices in 3D Virtual Environments. He aims to help improve remote team collaboration  and distance learning by visual communication and embodied group interaction.

Andreas is a member of the Red-Ink Doctoral School and member of the knowledge-communication.org team.

In the past, he has worked as a freelancing software engineer, as a research associate at Fraunhofer IAO, and most recently as a research assistant at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand, HIT Lab NZ.

Andreas is working on virtual worlds, collaborative virtual environments, computer-supported collaborative work, virtual campus

Download Andreas’ CV (PDF)

Contact Andreas at

Tel. +41 (0)58 666 4674
Mail: andreas.schmeil@lu.unisi.ch
Skype: aschmeil

Rapanta Chrysi (PhD student)

Chrysi was born in Greece, where she graduated in Psychology in 2004. After that she moved to Spain (Barcelona, Malaga, Granada) where she spent her time learning and answering questions such as ‘What is creativity?’, ‘How do people learn?’, ‘How can we evaluate argumentation?’ etc.

Finally the Spanish decided to give her the research sufficiency, so that they could get rid of her, but they didn’t give her money to finish the Phd she was developing there. So she returned to Greece where she was doing the stuff she knew to do (teaching and counseling) but she was still searching for the Perfect Phd. And she found it in Newmine Lab of Lugano!

Chrysi is currently working on: Design methodology, Communication patterns, Informal reasoning, eLearning

Contact Chrysi at

Tel.:  +41586664760
Mail: chrysi.rapanta@lu.unisi.ch
skype: xrysa_rapanda

De Ascaniis Silvia (PhD student)

She is a collaborator of the eLearning Lab (eLab) at the Università della Svizzera Italiana and she is part of the Red Ink Pro*Doc programme, within which she is developing a PhD in the field that overlaps education, argumentation theory and ICTs.

She was born in Giulianova (Italy) but she has been living in Lugano since 2001, where she completed the Bachelor (2004) and the Master in Communication Sciences (2007) at the Università della Svizzera Italiana.

She likes spending her free-time cooking for her friends, reading fantasy stories, training open air sports.

Silvia is working on mobile devices, financial training, computer-supported argument visualization tools, ancient rhetoric

View Silvia’s full profile.

Contact Silvia at

Tel.:  +41 (0)58 666 47 60
Mobile (personal): 076.5828855
silvia.de.ascaniis@lu.unisi.ch
skype: deascans

Cantoni Lorenzo – NewMinE director (Prof.)

Lorenzo Cantoni graduated in Philosophy and holds a PhD in Education and Linguistics.

He is professor at the University of Lugano (Switzerland), Faculty of Communication Sciences, where he is also deputy-director of the Institute of Public Communication and Education. He’s vice-Dean of the Faculty.

Lorenzo Cantoni is director of the laboratories webatelier.net: production and promotion over the Internet, NewMinE Lab: New Media in Education Lab, eLab: eLearning Lab; he is executive director of TEC-Lab: Technology Enhanced Communication Lab.

View Lorenzo’s profile.

Contact Lorenzo at

Tel. +41 (0)58 666 47 20
lorenzo.cantoni@lu.unisi.ch

Rapetti Emanuele (PhD student)

Emanuele graduated in Education in 2007 (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore – Milan – Italy). Member of Red-InK Doctoral School (Rethinking Education in the Knowledge Society, program funded by Swiss National Science Foundation), he’s having his PhD about e-learning, particularly studying how it’s changing the way people learn in the knowledge society.

Since 1 April 2008 he’s teacher assistant in faculty of Communication and researcher at NewMinElab, involved in several project; on of the most remarkable was Bridge4Peace. Previously, he worked as educator (in a community for risky children), media educator, teacher for handicapped people in a secondary school and teacher assistant at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore.

His research interests are: Pedagogy and Educational Issue for Third Millennium, E-learning, Media Education, E-ethnography, E-evaluation, Qualitative methods in educative-social research.

View Emanuele’s profile on red-ink.

View Emanuele’s page at USI.

Meet Emanuele on Linkedin

Contact Emanuele at

Tel. +41 (0)58 666 4547
Mobile: +41 77 461 43 66

Mail: emanuele.rapetti@usi.ch
Blog: materialieducativi.blogspot.com
Skype: emanuele.rapetti