Special Edition

Editorial

The measured education: opportunities and risks of digitally interlinked technologies.

Proceedings of the fifth JFMH (Junges Forum für Medien und Hochschulentwicklung) 2016

About the JFMH

This issue presents extended versions of selected contributions to the JFMH 2016. The JFMH is an interdisciplinary forum for young researchers and young professionals in the areas of media education, media didactics, and technology-enhanced learning at different learning places like universities, primary schools, or further training. The forum series is under the patronage of the German Society for Media in Science (GMW), the German Association for Educational and Academic Staff Development in Higher Education (dghd), the Section Media Education of the German Educational Research Association (DGfE), and the Special Interest Group "E-Learning" of the German Informatics Society (GI) since 2012. The fifth JFMH took place on the 10^th and 11^th of June 2016 in Darmstadt and was jointly organized by different groups at the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

The theme and the keynotes

The theme of JFMH 2016 was The measured education: opportunities and risks of digitally interlinked technologies (Die vermessen(d)e Bildung: Möglichkeiten und Risiken digital vernetzter Technologien). Digitally interlinked technologies reveal diverse opportunities in educational contexts but also present us with a new set of challenges, e.g., related to learning analytics or educational data mining. The objective of the JFMH 2016 was to critically examine opportunities and risks on an interdisciplinary basis. Different perspectives of researchers and professionals came together. This was reflected in different contributions of the young participants as well as in the following keynotes.

• Thomas Damberger discussed the "quantified self" movement from the perspective of education theory. The recording of his keynote is available at http://bit.ly/2lFm2ZL.
• Ilona Buchem took a critical look at open badges to appreciate and present competencies individually acquired at university courses. The recording of her keynote is available at http://bit.ly/2qbeL9I.
• Alexander Kiy took a more technical stance on the theme by presenting a diversity of data sources, ranging from centralized learning systems like LMS through apps, to sensors from personal devices like smart watches. He also presented different examples to support the introductory study phase developed at the University of Potsdam. The recording of his keynote is available at http://bit.ly/2qbZVzP.
• Josef Wiemeyer brought attention to a different perspective – the measurement of the quality of different learning resources and teaching approaches – by presenting results from his manifold field studies performed during his academic teaching. The recording of his keynote is available at http://bit.ly/2EC0PZy.

Contributions in this issue

Josef Wiemeyer mentions in his contribution the analysis of data generated by the usage of digital media during the learning process. This analysis allows information to be revealed concerning learning behavior and the quality of the media and the teaching process. Wiemeyer compares the self-improvement benefits of the increase of knowledge with the price that has to be paid for, in particular, the increased effort concerning staff, material, and time. He illustrates this using four different examples from teaching sport science.

Alexander Kiy presents an explanatory framework for the media-didactical design of teaching, learning, and research scenarios. The starting point for his considerations is the wide range of available digitized teaching and learning support, which is hardly manageable for teachers. He uses a variety of practices modelled in the framework as a starting point to outline a concept of a system architecture. This enables on the one hand the automatic provisioning of any desired application, and on the other hand the cross-system aggregation of user data.

Anne Mock und Daniel Bodemer are dealing with open learning settings in which exchange partners in social media platforms, who are not part of the learning group, contribute with further knowledge. She presents a study that examines whether there are differences in the perception of cognitive and social awareness information, as well as the strength of the exchange partners’ interrelations. Hence, she derives and tests an awareness taxonomy for formal learning settings.

Sophie Schaper examines the use of the social networking site Facebook and the messenger WhatsApp with regard to student-teacher relationships. She performed problem-centered interviews with students and interpreted them by a qualitative content analysis. Results show that students differ in their interaction with their teachers. Two types of students can be distinguished based on criteria from four different categories, which have been identified by means of the qualitative analysis.

Armin Egetenmeier’s contribution belongs to the area of predictive learning analytics for student success – a widespread application of learning analytics. In his contribution he shows that with the help of a comprehensive database study, dropouts at the Aalen University of Applied Sciences can be precisely predicted. He presents different statistical methods for the prediction of dropouts based on data sets consisting of measures collected in a pre-study course in math combined with administrative data sets of the university information system.

Kai Gebhardt presents a concept and tool to analyze the learning progress of students based on exercises they work on at different self-training stations during an exercise session. At the different stations, different tasks are processed by the students and different competencies are to be conveyed. Based on each students’ responses at the stations, a competence level achieved in the conveyed competencies is calculated. These levels are presented to the students and the teacher. Thereby, the teacher gets an overview of the competencies of the students and is able to identify areas which he should address in depth with the whole group.

Erik Kremser and Yanick Ballensiefen present their comprehensive experiences in the use of collaborative learning journals in a university course and they also present evaluation results. In the collaborative learning journal, the students merge feelings and thoughts about the learning content in addition to filling out an individual part that is used to reflect their findings and own development. In the paper, the authors compare two concepts based on the two different software tools Mahara and OneNote.

Lisa Scharrer, Michael Bender, and Andrea Rapp argue the use of methods and techniques from the field of digital humanities in teaching scenarios in primary school and university education. To transfer the concepts of digital humanities didactically appropriately into digital teaching scenarios, an intensive reflection of the processes and frameworks is required. In the paper the authors present these aspects by discussing two examples, co-occurrence visualization and part-of-speech tagging, in detail.

Linda Heise investigates the inclusion of active top athletes who study in parallel to their competitive sport. The paper presents results of a qualitative study about the challenges and special needs of this group of students. Furthermore, it discusses different dual-career-allowing perspectives of digital learning.

Quantified tweets: measurements of the digital participation at the forum

It is a long tradition at the JFMH series to tweet about the JFMH during the forum using the hashtag #jfmh and the according year, which this time was #jfmh16. This kind of communication is used to partially document and reflect on the presentations and discussions, to forward links to related sources, and to partially allow participation for community members who are absent. Franco Rau analyzed the digital participation at the forum based on the tweet statistics. The archive analyzed contains 356 tweets, 188 links, and 142 retweets from the period of June 6^th to June 12^th, 2016.

The following figure shows the temporal distribution of the tweets during the two forum days. It shows a strong peak at the morning of the 2^nd day corresponding to the keynote held by Ilona Buchem.

Figure 1: Twitter activity during the JFMH

The data also allows evaluations of the relationships between the different authors of tweets. The following figure shows the replies (solid grey), mentions (dashed grey dotted), and retweets (dashed blue). Overall the high degree of interaction becomes obvious.

Figure 2: Relationships based on #jfmh16 tweets

Acknowledgments

In concluding, we would like to thank all those who have contributed to the JFMH 2016 as well as to this eleed issue, without whose support both the forum and the issue would neither would have been possible. The representatives of all four societies involved in the JFMH should be mentioned. They worked together with the local organizers to design the structure and the program of the forum. Members of all these societies assisted the young participants and authors. They gave manifold feedback in the preparation of their presentations as well as their papers.

Our thank also goes to the keynote speakers for their important ideas, to the participants of the forum for their passionate discussions, and to the authors of the papers presented in this issue for their patience in connection with the publication process.

A special thanks goes to the financial supporters of the JFMH, namely the Forum for Interdisciplinary Research (FIF) and the Profile Area Internet and Digitization, both at Technische Universität Darmstadt, as well as to the two editors, Franco Rau and Christoph Rensing, who also managed all the important matters at Darmstadt and provided a welcoming, immensely fruitful atmosphere and a great space for networking.

Finally, we would like to thank the eleed journal and their publishers for the opportunity to release the JFMH contributions in this issue.

The editors

Franco Rau, Christoph Rensing, Diana Bücker, Valentin Dander, Andrea Gumpert, Anja Lorenz, Johannes Konert, Angelika Thielsch, and Timo van Treeck