Digital Media

This book focuses on the educational opportunities and effects of education in an electronic environment. Digital media in education find a variety of applications: from teaching and learning programs, databases and tools, through learning games, experiments and simulations to complex communication and collaboration environments. Accordingly, there are multiple possible forms of application in teaching and related teaching activities. Expectations of a learning-inducing effect are linked, inter alia, to the functionalities and characteristics inherent in digital media, or their specific offerings. In addition to creating learning offerings that are based on different types of coding and affect different sensory modalities, there are e.g., interactive touch with learning objects, opportunities to adapt to learning prerequisites, feedback with some learning activities, research and simulations, or online site-based creation of distributed learning sections in virtual spaces. The extent to which such potentials have been utilized, what forms and scenarios of utilization prevail, and whether expectations about the change in culture and learning outcomes have been met is an empirical question, which should be explained in the following sections. But a comprehensive assessment of digital media must also refer to other educational and educational contexts, such as the education of young children, youth work, vocational education and adult education and training. In addition, the potential of digital media is, in principle, reflected in their cultural significance and their general educational value. If dealing with digital media in education does not boil down to media-didactic issues - and thus in a narrow sense, to the possibilities of improving the learning process - then other tasks, related to the changes expressed by the term "digital culture", will come to light. Digital media create new conditions for self-understanding and understanding of the world and children and young people use them especially in the process of non-formal learning. Little is known about this form of knowledge acquisition and its possibilities to be linked to institutionalized learning processes. Dealing with digital media should therefore be part of the everyday life of education and should be based on an understanding of the correlation between culture and technology. Former school education processes are characterized by closeness. This situation changes when teaching with the introduction of digital media - especially the Internet - opens, thereby losing some of that closure. The aforementioned educational aspects and the educational areas that follow could not be analyzed in detail in this book based on empirical data. Therefore, they are summarized and evaluated in the views of individual experts. The application of digital media in college had to be left out altogether. The online information used by students is no longer editorially processed and didactically reduced information, but a particular challenge for teachers. Such information must be evaluated and require an opinion. At the same time, it becomes clear that there must also be a goal to enable students to think critically about media offers, evaluate them and use them when needed.