Elektronische Medien für den Geschichtsunterricht - Eine Herausforderung für die Geschichtsdidaktik?
Electronic media in the teaching of history - A challenge for the didactics of history?
- Elektronische Medien für den Geschichtsunterricht - Eine Herausforderung für die Geschichtsdidaktik?
- Electronic media promise to give a totally new impulse to the teaching of history und deserve a growing attention of international didactical reflection. On the one hand, CD-ROMs in particular offer fascinating possibilities. They can handle a variety of data including pictures, sound und moving pictures, which can be infinitely linked by "Hypertext". The computer allows interactive learning and stunning 3-dimensional-effects. The structure of electronic media seems to make them suitable to show history under different points of view ("multiperspectively") following one of the central concerns of modern didactics. The article points out that on the other hand the fascinating opportunities of electronic media do not guarantee by themselves an improved learning of history. The analysis of existing programmes which exhaustively use the possibilities of electronic media shows the difficulties to bring together multimedia and the structure of historical content. The extensive use of linksElectronic media promise to give a totally new impulse to the teaching of history und deserve a growing attention of international didactical reflection. On the one hand, CD-ROMs in particular offer fascinating possibilities. They can handle a variety of data including pictures, sound und moving pictures, which can be infinitely linked by "Hypertext". The computer allows interactive learning and stunning 3-dimensional-effects. The structure of electronic media seems to make them suitable to show history under different points of view ("multiperspectively") following one of the central concerns of modern didactics. The article points out that on the other hand the fascinating opportunities of electronic media do not guarantee by themselves an improved learning of history. The analysis of existing programmes which exhaustively use the possibilities of electronic media shows the difficulties to bring together multimedia and the structure of historical content. The extensive use of links and medial overflow tend to confuse the user, who in most cases will not be able to recognize the underlying structure. Multimedia is also a challenge to methodology because children have to be taught new techniques of selective und critical reading which will enable them to cope with the overfow of information, to understand the complex structure of multimedia and to recognize their manipulative qualities. Electronic media can no longer be ignored since computer games have conquered the imagination of children and have become an integral part of their every day life as "hidden fellow-educators" ("geheime Miterzieher"). In showing the productive capacities of multimedia as a useful part of the world of learning, teachers of specific subjects such as history can play an essential role in providing one of the key-capacities for the coming century.…