Writing Place History, Living Place History: Dimensions of Student Learning in a Geomedia-based Holocaust Education Environment

As contemporary witnesses of the Holocaust in both family and institutional environments disappear, Holocaust Education has to deal with a radical change. A wide variety of digital, sometimes spatially-explicit, learning environments have been developed that could be called 'virtually interactive'. Only a few of these learning environments allow for research-based learning, and even fewer have been evaluated according to the aims of Holocaust Education itself, or with regard to the digital tools used. This contribution presents central aspects of an evaluation of a research- and geomedia-based learning environment. It was tested with students at various schools in Vienna's second district, specifically in the Stuwerviertel, which was a place of widespread deportation during the Nazi regime. In this paper, we concentrate on three domains: (1) the usability of currently available tools, (2) the emotional side of the research-based learning process, and (3) the contributions of the learning environment to the formation of the political subject.