Abstract
The importance of media-based learning is increasing in all educational contexts, such as school, higher education and continuing education. New media are said to play a decisive role in changing teaching and learning. The fascination of these media lies, for example, in their distribution potential for learning resources with databases, learning materials, expert knowledge. But they are also characterised by their interaction and communication potential, with which they influence and change the organisation of learning processes that are flexible in time and place (cf. Hesse/Friedrich 2001). In teaching and learning processes, new media can take on three functions: the function as a knowledge tool as well as their use for knowledge representation and knowledge transfer. This refers to multimedia documents, hypertext structures and network services. On the other hand, new media, and especially the Internet, continue the societal, social and cultural tendencies towards differentiation and individualisation. New media such as the internet change people in their thinking and actions, and influence social institutions. These processes of change affect the perspective of education. If we look at the current media education research landscape, we can identify a polarisation that Marotzki (2000) has pointed out: namely, the polarisation of the media education topic with learning theory implications on the one hand and education theory considerations on the other.
