MEDIEN – WISSEN – BILDUNG

Ever since digital technologies became widespread, the increasing capacities of storing, exchanging and sharing of information have given rise to optimistic scenarios of an egalitarian information society as well as to pessimistic views of a technocratic surveillance society. Educationalists have pointed out both chances for opening up and enhancing education and also tendencies of stupefaction, problematic power relations, or memory decline. Philosophers have eulogized or censored superficiality, social scientists have focused on networks as agency, the IT industry has made immediate availability a paradigm of development. Questions of archiving have often been overlooked, addressed within a conservative criticism of new media, or considered as a symptom of the historical disease at last to be left behind. Yet all of these approaches fail to do justice to the contemporary social, political, cultural and educational questions regarding the possibilities of digital archives. In the past few years manifold initiatives aiming at opening up education on various levels using digital communications technologies and Creative Commons licenses as well as massive open online courses (moocs)