This is my first weekly analysis within my learning diary in the course “Didaktics of media”. I will try to summarize what I’ve learned within the week and to set a new goal for the next week each Sunday around noon.
Summary
This week I got a first feeling for the research area “Didaktics of Media”. Before I had a certain understanding about the term “Didaktics” I would have associated it with the term “education” only. Now I understood that “Didaktics” is mostly about the theory how you can teach students, for which purpose and so on. The “k” in it means we are talking about the ancient European studies on the “didactics” discipline.
The “Media” aspects mostly intrododuces the field of my studies “International Media and Computing”. It is about how the media can be integrated into the teaching and learning process. With the media we have different methods that are used within the “Didaktics” triangle: we have a multimedia objects that work as “icons” and might represent feelings (and not the intellect). This is mostly given in social networks. There, big groups of people can interact over long distances.
For my own work, I got a first feeling that I have to focus on the Didaktic’s key questions when I design software that contains some kind of learning elements. This can be questions about Human Computer Interaction questions, too – like the ergonomics of the user interface.
After reading “Restrained Teaching: the common core of Didaktik” by Stefan Hopmann I realized that there are differences between the values of teaching between Europe and the United States. In Germany, the term “Bildung” has a special value that the term “education” doesn’t imply: the learner has to unfold his or her individuality and to learn for him- or herself. In the United States the model of the “Curriculum and instruction” is very common. This is mostly kind of a “push-principle” to push instructions to the learner. Personally, I like the idea of German term “Bildung” much more than the Curriculum and instructions model, because this mostly implies a “pattern”-learning necessarity. I don’t like the idea of that – one should really understand about the material that is brought by a teacher and you should be able to think about it in order to learn from it yourself.
Goal for next week
Next week, I want to optimize the writing of my learning diary. Currently, I still have to look to get a feeling about the contents that need to be included. So I hope to be able to compare my first week entries to the ones of others. I should also reflect my learning behaviour and whether the learning diary changed my learning ability. But I think that writing about literature that one has read can really help to remember it’s contents better. I will look on this in the next weekly analysis.