Christoph Kodron
Internet as a tool: The example of the Deutscher Bildungsserver
(German Education Server = Eduserver)

Presentation given at the 26th Annual Conference of the Association for Teacher Education in Europe (ATEE) 27th of August – 1st of September 2001 at Stockholm, Institute of Education.

A short overview of main aspects will be given in the following..

What is the Deutscher Bildungsserver = the German Education Server = Eduserver?

The Deutscher Bildungsserver is a web information portal maintained by the federal authorities and the sixteen states (the Länder) of the Federal Republic of Germany. It can be accessed at http://www.eduserver.de and at http://www.bildungsserver.de. As ”meta-server” it collects information, texts and materials of other servers, also those of the more than 60 education servers in German language. 
The main objectives are to make all relevant information on education in Germany (as well as other German speaking countries) available on Internet, to make official information on education provided by the States (die Länder) and the Federation (der Bund) accessible and to offer all interested persons access to ”best practice” examples, as well as offering to teachers, educators and university professors the possibility of sharing their teaching materials with colleagues.
The main office of the Eduserver is in Frankfurt on Main at the Deutsches Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung (German Institute for International Educational Research). It has the overall responsibility for the content and works on the browser structure in co-operation with partner institutions as well as individual experts. The Institut für Film und Bild (FWU Educational Media Institute) at Grünwald near Munich is especially responsible for information on the primary and secondary school education sector. The technical office is at the Abteilung Pädagogik und Informatik (Department of Education and Information Technology) of the Humboldt University at Berlin. A steering group, consisting of representatives of the federal and Länder governments as well as education experts, acts as advisory body on issues regarding the structure and development of the Eduserver.

How does the Deutscher Bildungsserver work?

All data available on the Deutscher Bildungsserver are administrated by several databases. This has several advantages, e.g. broken links can be found by an automatic programme and thus quickly repaired. 
The main database is the ”Resources” including online-resources with more than 13 000 entries. Here different kinds of ”materials” can  be found, e.g. texts (in several languages) on the education system in Germany, teaching materials about Germany. The number of teaching materials is growing quickly; they are mainly inserted directly by teachers, professors and adult educators. After being entered the content is checked by a person in the office before it is included over into the database. Unfortunately teacher trainers from the university sector as well as practice teaching and continuing education instructors are as yet not very active in sharing their experience with others and in inserting their teaching materials into an internet database, but the number is growing. 
In this section one can also find the ”Datenbank Bildungsmedien”, an online catalogue of about 7000 learning media for school teaching and the ”Zeitungsdokumentation Bildungswesen” an online documentation of titles of articles on education in about 40 daily, weekly or monthly newspapers, magazines and newsletters (mainly in German language). One can order copies of articles on a pay bases. 
Interesting for teacher trainers are the open source and share ware programmes, provided, designed for teaching, for establishing an internet working space for co-operation or a programme for implementing a mailing list.
The ”Institutions” database contains more than 3000 addresses of all relevant public and private institutions in education in Germany and core institutions in German-speaking countries as well as other European countries and relevant international bodies. One generally finds the address with telephone and fax numbers and a clickable e-mail address and internet presentation. (If you are looking for a German school, you can find those active and with an internet homepage in the ”Schulweb”, http://www.schulweb.de , especially designed for schools. It is also part of the Deutscher Bildungsserver.)
The ”People” database includes about 5000 persons (experts) from the education sector; persons who have inserted their own personal details, due to the legal requirements of data protection in the individual sphere. Nevertheless, one can e.g. find nearly all university professors of education there.
The ”Events” database contains more than 1500 events in the field of education (from 1999 onward) such as congresses, colloquia, summer universities, in-service education offers, mainly in Germany, but events of international  relevance also in a wide range of other countries. This calendar is available in German, English and French. Users are invited to insert their own events or also events they consider important by using one of the online-masks offered in the three languages. This calendar can be searched by words found in the title or in the short description, by dates at which it takes place, by the target groups for whom the event is intended and by the language spoken at the event.
Additionally the Deutsches Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung  (DIPF German Institute for International Educational Research) http://www.dipf.de has set up a special calendar of events in the field of educational research, education administration and history of education. In fact, this is a sub-calendar of the larger general calendar of events. It is designed for that target group and to be found in the Internet at http://bildungsserver.de/termine/dipf/index_e.html  , there too you are invited to enter your important national, European and international events in a German, English or French mask designed for academics without any cost or other obligations under http://bildungsserver.de/termine/dipf/termine_eingabe_dipf_e.html   .

The ”Glossary” is a closed but researchable database mainly providing official explanations in German, English and French of key words of German education.

The ”Competitions” database contains different (German and European) competitions for learners, mainly for school pupils. It is researchable and also offers the possibility to enter new competitions without any cost or other obligations by users, but only within a German mask.

The ”Jobs in education” database is also only available in German. Employers can advertise their posts or jobs in all fields of education. Those searching for a new job in an educational field can enter their own requests.

The brower structure of the Deutscher Bildungsserver

Core information on all fields of (formal) education in the Federal Republic of Germany are provided in the browser structure. This aspect is worked on jointly by the office of the Eduserver and co-operating bodies. Using the search options, one will generally find more and a broader scope of information. The core information is organised into six main fields. 
1)	General Information on the federal education system in Germany including the following sub-topics: The German education system, education policy, education legislation, education statistics, regional education servers, Europe-related and international information, education in the media, literature and full-text archives and other education portals.
2)	Schools / Primary and Secondary Education with the following sub topics: The school system; authorities, offices and institutions; schools; advice and counselling services; syllabuses; curricula and guidelines; programmes and projects; methodology and didactics; media, equipment and administration; communication; holiday schedule; exchange programmes and student’s travels; education servers.
3)	Vocational Training : Institutions and associations; vocational training policy; programmes, pilot and model projects; mobility; vocational schools; trades and professions; mailing lists; e-journals; databases; international aspects; news and views.
4)	Higher Education: Higher education policy; higher education planning and development; higher education management; higher education research; higher education teaching and didactics; study opportunities and counselling; mailing lists and newsletters; e-journals.
5)	Science and Educational Research: Institutions; educational research; research statistics.
6)	Continuing Education and Adult Education: Institutions and associations; basic and advanced in-service training; range of courses and studies; continuing and adult education around the world; political education; research on continuing and adult education; advanced university training, news and views on continuing education.

Special offers for target groups

For some target groups special useful links are offered. The target groups are: Pupils; (university) students; apprentices and trainees; teachers; (education) scientists and academics; educational administration and parents. This part is not very well developed yet because we are just begining to search for partners in this fields. Nevertheless, the information put together is of some importance as the following two examples may show: 

”Teachers” find information on teaching materials and media, school projects, events especially selected for teachers as well as competitions. Information is gathered on authorities, offices and institutions; associations and syndicates; education servers; syllabuses, curricula and guidelines; media, equipment and administration; methodology and didactics; online advanced training for teachers; exchange for teachers; applying for a teaching position; mailing lists; newsletters and forums and an overall long-term holiday schedule.

“(Education) Scientists and Academics” are offered information on: Promoting and funding research; selected German research support and funding organisations; European support and funding institutions; list of foundations and support funding institutions; list of scientific academies and academic societies; information and events; co-operation and exchange; e-journals and information services; useful sources of information and assistance; travel grants; timetables, etc. as well as mailing lists.

Search and retrievel in the Deutscher Bildungsserver

Even though the Deutscher Bildungsserver provides an increasingly amount of information, texts and materials in English, the main databases are solely in German. Therefore a basic knowledge of German is useful to gain full access to the information available. We are working on implementing multilingual keywords, but it may take some time to complete this. Therefore, it is best to use German words for searching now, but you will also obtain useful basic information by entering words in English (or even in French e.g. ”education Allemagne”or Spanish e.g. when you use ”estudiar”).
The search function in the blue headline of the Deutscher Bildungsserver allows a search with simple combinations (”all words” or ”only one of the words”) in all databases with the exception of ”glossary” ;”competitions” and ”jobs in education”. 
Besides this overall search, the Eduserver offers an ”Advanced Search” option which allows one to search specifically through individual data fields. 
When one chooses a single database one will only find the specific search function for that database. 
As a special additionally offer, the Deutscher Bildungsserver enables full-text searches for HTML-pages on numerous German-language education servers and on the servers operated by German education publishers. For that search a good mastery of German is necessary.

Concluding remarks

Unfortunately we do not know in detail yet how our users are using the German Bildungsserver. One can imagine that information on how people are taking advantage of such a meta-server, offering central access to other education servers and to a great variety of information on the education systems and its institutions as well as persons employed in this field, is not easy to obtain and requires specific research. Nevertheless we can assume on the basis of some smaller research projects with pupils and students, on requests and other e-mails that the teaching materials offered are of growing importance, even in teacher education. Heads of schools, principals are increasingly using the Eduserver to keep informed and to share information on what others are doing. With respect to teacher training, the Eduserver seems to be used mainly by students and not so much by teacher trainers themselves. Students use it often as a central information tool e.g. to gain access to the major online education libraries, to see weather they can find teaching materials for the school practice, to compare different German teaching prescriptions. Some university professors may be using only as address database it up to now. Intranet managers use our information on the media and net as well as the mail service. Teachers in bilingual schools are increasingly using the special portal for bilingual teaching http://lernen.bildung.hessen.de/faecher/bilingual/index_portal . But even though one can find good examples on the Eduserver on how to use internet as an teaching tool, for virtual teaching and extremely well made materials such as the ”Virtual Geography Texts” on Germany and Canada http://www.v-g-t.de  the range of possibilities to be tried out in future is extensive. Therefore I would like to receive your comments and proposals. 

Kodron@dipf.de
Christoph Kodron, c/o DIPF, Schloss-Str. 29, D – 60 486 Frankfurt am Main, Germany