For German-language media education, the year 2000 begins with the first academic online journal that places theoretical discourse on media and media education at the centre of its programme. It is published by the AG Medienpädagogik of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Erziehungswissenschaft and the Department of Media Education of the Pestalozzianum Zurich. This gives our discipline a publication organ that enables it to better network and publicise a discourse that has only developed very gradually over the last century.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was above all the industrialised printed products, made up to meet the needs of a mass market, that set the agenda of media education. The problem of a mass distribution of "trash literature" was discussed and a demand was made for "uncorrupted" children's and youth literature. Other positions - such as that of Heinrich Wolgast (1910) - on the other hand rejected a specific children's and youth literature inspired in advance by morals and doubted its aesthetic value. In the 1920s, the aspect of film was added - also predominantly from the point of view of protecting children and young people (Popert 1927). Media competence, however, was hardly an issue in all these discussions; rather, children and young people were regarded as defenceless victims of products that were solely committed to commerce.
In general, media education was for a very long time committed to a normative pedagogy that believed that children and young people had to be protected primarily from an overstimulation by - morally reprehensible - media, the so-called "secret co-educators" (Beer 1960). Accordingly, the theoretical content of the discourse on media was relatively weak. The overcoming of these normative positions was connected in particular with an increased empirical orientation of media education, as it increasingly appeared on the scene in the context of the "realist turn" in educational science from the 1960s onwards. At the same time, these efforts were initially still strongly related to the basic structure of preservation pedagogy as it was associated with the concepts of the effects research of the time. The aim was to empirically substantiate the problematic effects of the media - and now above all of television; but this was not possible without forming substantial empirical hypotheses. To cite just one prominent example: Herta Sturm's research (Sturm 1985) on the "missing half-second" could not simply formulate normative recommendations, but had to differentiate the construct of media effects in an empirically substantial way. Because of the demands this made, simple answers were less and less possible.
Dieter Baacke, for example, emphasised in 1973 that the term "mass media" is not a culturally critical but a descriptive term. Rather, it was problematic to associate terms such as "mass society", since the public sphere in today's society does not represent an unstructured and amorphous mass (cf. Baacke 1973, p. 13 f.). Since then, discussions from the fields of media science and culture have increasingly found their way into the discipline of media education: theories such as the knowledge gap theory or the concept of the active reader developed within the framework of cultural studies were suitable for questioning the assumption of uniform effects of media on the population of children and adolescents and for not simply addressing the position of the recipient from a victim role.
In the last twenty years, the new medium of the computer has also raised pedagogical questions that have triggered discussions at various levels. On the social level, it was discussed to what extent today's society can be called a media or information society and how children and young people should be prepared for it. On the didactic level, the question was how to integrate the new media into the school, or how learning is changed by them.
All these topics and discussions are currently being expressed in a variety of publications and articles in professional journals. However, there is a lack of a medium that systematically documents and promotes the discourse of media pedagogy. This gap is to be filled by the journal MedienPädagogik, the first issue of which you have here on your screen. The partners involved have consciously chosen an online journal as the format. The weight of electronic media in the discussion on media education is thus expressed in a sensual way, so to speak.
In terms of content, this first issue takes up a core topic of today's discussion about the media, namely the key concept of media competence. The choice of topic for this first issue is not least intended as a homage to Dieter Baacke, the doyen and comrade-in-arms for the cause of media education, who unfortunately passed away much too early, and who has provided essential impulses for media education discussion and practice since the seventies of the last century.
In the contributions to this issue, the concept of media competence coined by him - ironically described by Kübler (1996) as the "favourite metaphor of media education" - is discussed and its function for the current media education debate is made clear. In particular, it deals with the question of the extent to which media competences are acquired quasi automatically by children and young people through socialisation processes, or what significance the "learning" of such competences has. In this context, it becomes clear that it is not simply a matter of reflection, in that children and young people are educated about the meaning of the media; rather, it is always also about the creative and creative aspects - in other words, about competent action. This dimension is currently particularly evident in the interactivity of media such as the internet, which offers children and young people a multitude of opportunities for participation - from taking part in chats and online discussions to having their own homepage.
However, media competence should also be understood as a content-related claim in our journal, namely in the sense of a publication organ that competently informs about media and media pedagogical issues and advances the scientific debate. In this context, we also rely on the interactivity of the media. In this sense, we are looking forward to reactions to the contributions in this issue. For this purpose, a discussion forum has been set up where the debate on the contributions at hand can be taken up. In an online journal, it is possible to design such discourses as integrated components of a journal issue. The publishers and editors would be pleased if these possibilities were actively used by the readers of the journal.
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