Today, hundreds of thousands of students enroll in Internet-based courses (Massively
Open Online Courses—MOOCs); digital tablets and multimedia textbooks have
found their way into the classroom; people do not only routinely look up information
on Wikipedia but also feed their own knowledge into online networks; and
learners interact with digital content not only via screen, keyboard, and mouse but
have begun to access and actively transform information via immersive displays and
bodily activities such as gesture or touch. Putting all these trends together, constructing,
exchanging, and acquiring knowledge has undergone a fundamental
transformation in the past three decades.
Fifteen years ago, the field of digitally enhanced learning was in the midst of this
transformation: Multimedia applications, intelligent tutorial systems, email, and
web browsers had already been around for several years. Apple had at this time just
introduced the iPod, Marc Prensky coined the term “Digital Natives,” Richard
Mayer published his influential book on “Multimedia Learning,” and eLearning was
a trendy buzzword. However, there were neither smartphones, YouTube, Wikipedia,
or Facebook, nor a systematic monitoring of these developments for education (the
first Horizon report of the New Media Consortium was issued in 2004).