Abstract:

According to a recent study of the German Bertelsmann-foundation (Schmid et al. 2017), German teachers' students currently are at the bottom of the scale as regards the use of digital media as part of their teachers' training in university. This disastrous outcome correlates with the poor German performance in the International Computer and Information Literacy Study (Bos et al. 2014), and the still ongoing critical results of the national monitoring (Lorenz 2017). Although German teachers self-efficacy in the technical use of digital media seems to be rising (Endberg 2017), there is still a demand for further research on how to strengthen digital competencies amongst pre-service teachers and how to encourage them to implement digital media in their lesson planning expediently. However, this question is not a national perspective: As Ertmer and colleagues already pointed out, teachers themselves noted that "the strongest barriers preventing other teachers from using technology were their existing attitudes and beliefs toward technology, as well as their current levels of knowledge and skills" (Ertmer et al. 2012, 423). Although there is no undisputed evidence on the relationship between teachers' use of technology and their beliefs (Admiraal 2017), it needs more measures and plans of action to incorporate a piece of knowledge within teachers education that is as well practical and theoretical. On the one hand, the existence of an obvious gap between teachers' private media habitus (Biermann 2009) and their teachers' beliefs upon digital media asks for more self-reflective tools. Besides, we need more innovative tools at the border of theory and practice (Endberg 2017) and especially those who are close to the students existing knowledge and priorities (Kanaya et al. 2005) – even in the question of media formats. Facebook is still popular (2.1 Billion users) as well as YouTube (1,5 billion users). 1.3 billion users use communication on WhatsApp. There are around 1 billion Instagram-users worldwide with a unique peek amongst user less than 25 years old (Fisching 2018), and up to 62 million daily users of Snapchat in Europe, 75% of them belonging to the age group 14-29 (Statista 2018).

This presentation will outline a current evaluated teaching and research project of a literature course at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. It demonstrates the integration of students preferred media tools and addressing strategies into an E-Learning platform. It comments on the results of an accompanying qualitative empirical evaluation, using mixed methods (Denzin et al. 2008) realized by questionnaires as well as content analysis and experts interviews to get closer insides to the students' expectations and preferences for current e-learning practice and its influence on their media habitus.

Keywords:

Digital media, teacher education, e-learning, digital competencies, teachers’ beliefs, media habitus, social media, media use culture.