What AI means for political media education

What is this episode about?
Everything is changing right now and that has a lot to do with the fact that the way we communicate in the media has changed. Even if we already have the impression that we are barely keeping up, we are only just getting started. It therefore makes sense to think about what lies ahead of us and that is intelligent systems that are superior to us when it comes to analyzing and assessing facts. What does this mean for political education? We want to explore this question in this piece. Let's see what answers we find.

Before we get started:
This episode, like most episodes, is pretty much 30 minutes long

The central questions are:
What does it mean for political education when media changes?

Who is speaking?
The author and speaker in this episode is Prof. Dr. Anja Besand. She is the Director of the John Dewey Research Center and holds the Chair of Didactics of Civic Education at TUD Dresden University of Technology. You can find out more about her here.

Literature for further reading:

Besand, Anja/Rentsch, Susanne (2025): Auswirkungen von Digitalisierung auf politische Bildung, in: Kersting, Norbert/Radtke, Jörg/Baringhorst, Sigrid (eds.): Handbuch Digitalisierung und politische Beteiligung, Wiesbaden (forthcoming).

Besand, Anja/Sander, Wolfgang (2010): Handbuch Medien im Politikunterricht, Schwalbach/Ts.

Besand, Anja (2018): From Game of Thrones to House of Cards - Politics in TV series, Wiesbaden.

Dörner, Andreas (2001): Politainment. Politics in the media experience society. Frankfurt a.M.

Meyer, Thomas (2001): Mediocracy. Die Kolonisierung der Politik durch die Medien, Frankfurt a.M. Ders., Media Democracy, Cambridge.

Luhmann, Niklas (1996): The Reality of the Mass Media, Opladen.

Self-examination tasks:

Question 1: Take a close look at which media you use to obtain political information. Where do you get the latest news? Where do you prefer to follow the related debates? Where do you perhaps take a stand yourself? Briefly describe your habits and discuss to what extent the way you conduct yourself politically and medally has an impact on politics as a whole

Question 2: Have you already dealt with ChatGPT (or a comparable system)? If not, please do so. Test what answers you get to questions that you yourself would ask participants in educational contexts. What consequences do you draw from these experiences for the design of educational programs?

Question 3: How do you answer the central question of the play? It is: WHAT KIND OF POLITICAL EDUCATION DO WE NEED UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF THE EXISTENCE OF AI SYSTEMS THAT HAVE EVEN MORE COMPETENT JUDGMENTAL COMPETENCIES THAN WE DO?