- Bundeskongresss Politische Bildung in Weimar, 3.November 2023, 10:30 AM
- With Sigrid Hartong, Professor for Sociology at Helmut-Schmidt-Universität Hamburg with research focus “Digital Education Governance”. Coordinates the project SMASCH, founder of the initiative Unblack the Box.
- Nils Eyk Zimmermann, programme manager, coordinator, advisor and author for civic education, digital transformation, active citizenship, civil society.
- Moderation: Philine Janus (Kooperative Berlin/werkstatt.BpB)
About the event: Technologies that are used in education always need pedagogical assessment. What questions should teachers ask in order to appropriately classify how educational software works? Sociologist Sigrid Hartong conducts research on datafication and the digitalisation of education and society. With the initiative Unblack the Box, she created the EdTechReflektor, which is intended to support teachers in the pedagogical review of educational media. Nils Eyk-Zimmermann works on transformation in political adult education (most recently, among other things, in the Working Group of German Educational Institutions with the project: DIGIT-AL).
In the workshop, we will talk together about how our notions of digital literacy need to be expanded by teachers and learners, and to what extent understanding and applying datafied technology is a basic requirement for practitioners in historical-political education.
Whether chat GPT, learning analytics, or content curated by platforms, how can educators adequately weigh the risks and potentials? When making decisions for tools and technology, social, legal, and data-economic issues matter in addition to pedagogical evaluation. To what extent can these aspects be controlled and corrected? Examples from the practice of workshop participants are requested, which can be analyzed and discussed together with the speakers. How can an application like the EdTechReflektor help? And what other needs do teachers have?
Five points and an exclamation mark
The decision in favor of a platform or a tool is a political-economic positioning on digitalisation, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Civic and democracy-related education in particular, which likes to pride itself on facilitating critical thinking, has for years been avoiding the consequences that should follow from this logic and that it could draw.
Criteria it sets for itself – no democratic education without basic democratic principles in the educational process – must also be applied to the educational organisation and its instrumental aspects.
Civic education must make a constructive contribution to diversity in the Internet ecosystem, as well as strengthen the independent side of software and hardware production, especially FOSS and OSS.
Instead of complaining about what all doesn’t work intuitively, use and build on what does.
More creativity and collaboration for more democratic and right-sensitive tools!