Digital extracurricular learning and education-related practices of young people

Principle Investigators: Prof. Dr. Karsten Wolf (ZeMKI, University of Bremen), Prof. Dr. Christian Pentzold (ZeMKI, University of Bremen)

Participating institutions: ZeMKI, University of Bremen, RWTH Aachen University

Funding: German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)

Duration: 2018-2021

The joint project investigates in four subprojects interdisciplinary and triangulative digital out-of-school learning- and education-related action practices of adolescents, related both to school-curricular objects and personal career orientation as well as to the acquisition of interest-based knowledge and knowledge/learning projects in leisure time. The composition of the project network with members from general didactics, media pedagogy, communication and media science, and subject didactics enables a comprehensive look at explanatory videos and tutorials, as they can be found in particular on YouTube and are used by young people on a large scale and almost on a daily basis. In addition, content- and learning-specific media and communication repertoires are examined in order to describe and analyze the variety of individual and collective practices of young people in out-of-school learning (self-expertization).

The subproject led by Prof. Dr. Karsten D. Wolf is responsible for the media analysis of out-of-school educational interests, quantitative reconstruction of the media environment and the qualitative interviews for the re-construction of communication and media repertoires. The subproject led by Prof. Dr. Christian Pentzold is responsible for the reconstruction of collaborative informal appropriation of learning content.