Edumeres.net: Virtual Networking, Cooperation and Research

International research on textbooks and other educational media is a field of scholarship which spans a broad range of disciplines and a wide geographical area. It operates at the intersection of academic research, school practice and education policy.

Via its virtual research environment (VRE) and access to relevant resources such as contents, research data and services, Edumeres.net allows for cooperation and collaboration in research extending beyond disciplinary boundaries. Edumeres thus implements in the field of educational media research recent developments towards communicative and collaborative networking structures, which are increasingly used in the humanities and social sciences.

The groundwork for the portal and general public access were made possible by a grant from the Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony (MWK). The construction and development of the portal and its integrated VRE took place over the course of the last two years, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). For the technical management of the portal and the VRE, the GEI draws on its previous positive experience with the content management system 'Typo3'. As open-source software, Typo3 offers diverse solutions with its wide circle of dynamic developers.

Edumeres.net is now a virtual point of reference for international educational media research and will continue using the virtual forms of communication and publication available today to develop, secure and sustain the networking role of the Georg Eckert Institute in the widespread community of educational media researchers.

Information, Publications, Topics

Access to information and search motors as well as various publication methods enables users to become acquainted with the basic principles and results of research. These are either created internally within the VRE, or submitted by users to be published online. Research results from the field of educational media are given open access in the publication sub-sections entitled 'Reviews', 'Analyses', 'Dossiers', 'Beiträge' and 'Conferences', and rendered quotable via a URN (Uniform Resource Name). Sections are also devoted to Eckert: The Book Series and the Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society (JEMMS), the journal of the GEI. The area devoted to ‘Topics’ provides users with access to information and materials from the portal. In addition, social tagging or collaborative tagging enables users, once logged on, to allocate headings of their choice to accessible contents. These then appear on the screen in tag clouds. Users thus have direct access to gateways dealing with specific topics which have either been defined by the portal editors or indexed directly by the users themselves.

The Virtual Research Environment (VRE)

The Edumeres.net VRE supports the entire research lifecycle, from data collection through knowledge production to research documentation, using extra (generic) services. These can be either core services, project-specific services or user-orientated functions. The contact area is based on the social communities concept and serves to establish personal networks that can also be used for communication within cooperative projects. Registered users can set these up themselves for their collaborative research. The system thus supports the work of its users by allowing them to adjust their own coordination and security settings themselves. The visibility of the project itself within the Edumeres community as well as the rights of individual project members are determined by a project leader. A text editor similar to Office, produced by Zoho, is available for collaborative work on documents. This permits simultaneous text production in connection with an integrated chat. Automatic back-ups are produced to document the various phases in the development of a document. A forum and a blog can be used for communication and discussion. Further, a simple data manager allows for the administration of material and data in a file system accessible only to project members. A messaging system records all changes to a project and dispatches relevant status emails at time intervalls determined by the project members themselves.

Scholars can also use the Edumeres.net publication area to publish their research results. The Edumeres editors provide support during the editing and necessary peer review processes. Publications on Edumeres.net are guaranteed the quotability and lasting availability of their document as an open access publication.