After a temporary crisis of history science and history education in the 1970s the public interest on historical subjects has increased. This led to a veritable history boom in the media and in the political discourse and had an impact on the legitimacy of history (Rauthe, 2008).  People deal with the past retrospectively and for different reasons. A history lesson, dealing only with events, names and numbers that have passed away and have nothing to do with one's own present, is juxtaposed with a concept in modern didactic research that raises awareness of its omnipresence and aims to encourage the abilities and skills of historical thinking (Schreiber, 2006).

Therefore, a growing interest in dealing with elements of the culture of remembrance can be observed in the scientific discussion as well as in the curricula. Remembrance culture in Germany has undergone changes since the end of the Second World War in 1945. Different phases can be identified. In general, the culture of remembrance can be considered as the interaction between an individual or a society and their past and history. Contemporary witnesses appear as a natural part of today`s remembrance and historical culture. They are decreasing in number and the number migrants that have no familial reference to the era of national socialism and the holocaust is increasing. Therefore, the possibilities of new media with regard to the preservation of these "memories" are getting increasingly important. Furthermore, it enables different ways of teaching and learning.

Another fact is that education is becoming more and more supported by information technology (IT) and is thus growing in relevance since we are living in an information society (Pelgrum, 2001). The history didactics reflects on the digital transformation and the use of digital media since the 1990s, on three levels: first, pragmatic aspects of (possible) changes in the history learning, second, the development of the historical consciousness of individuals, their historical images and historical imagination and thirdly, the impact on discipline itself (Demantowsky, Pallaske, 2015). In particular, the first two mentioned aspects seem important in this context. So why not use the possibilities of IT to support teaching a culture of remembrance in a collaborative way?

Thus, we aim to innovate an educational process for the remembrance culture by adapting the community-portal concept from Hofer et al. (2017) to build an interactive educational platform. The goal is to meaningfully link the process of historical learning with the promotion of media literacy. In this paper we will focus on the Hamburg region and its culture of remembrance but the approach itself can be used for regions across Europe.

Community and research portals can be considered as topic related websites designed to structure and collocate (research) information, which already exist elsewhere. The main goal of such a portal is the encouragement of collaboration in the community and the dissemination of research results (Becker et al. 2012). Lorenzo and Ittelson (2005) define a research portal as „digitized collection of artifacts, including demonstrations, resources, and accomplishments that represent an individual [...]”. The portal itself appears as an intersection between private and collective memory. When creating the individual contributions, both levels have to be fitted together. This provides an equally interesting insight into the presentation of the story of the actors involved. History and its interpretation must be negotiated (Altenkirch, 2015). The platform works as a digitalized society. We argue that such research portals, in respect of their provided functions, can also be used for other educational purposes. Thus, we will take the portal framework provided by Hofer et al. (2017) and instantiate an educational portal for our purpose.

The research methodology we follow complies with the Design Science approach (Hevner et al., 2004) that deals with the construction of scientific artifacts such as methods, languages, models, and implementations. Following the Design Science approach, it is necessary to assure that the research addresses a relevant problem. This relevance has to be proven. Furthermore, the artifacts to be constructed have to represent an innovative contribution to the existing knowledge base within the actual research discipline. This means that similar or identical solutions must not be already available. Subsequent to the construction of the artifacts, these have to be evaluated in order to prove their fulfillment of the research goals (Peffers et al., 2007). We will divide our research into seven phases: In the first phase, we will complete an extensive literature review to derive requirements for our portal solution. In the second phase, we will ask experts to prioritize these requirements and to extend them if necessary. These experts are history teachers, in particular from a comprehensive school located in Lower Saxony. In the third phase, we will summarize the requirements and will create, together the pupils a structure element called a “morphological box” that we will use to structure the information about the culture of remembrance. In the fifth phase, we will raise a web portal prototype based on an open source research portal toolkit „x.Navi“ (Hofer et al., 2018). When the portal is online, we will ask the pupils to expand the portal with data representing the culture of remembrance in the Hamburg region, which describes our sixth phase. For example, the pupil will take pictures of memorials, will retrieve information about these memorials and will collaborate with other pupils. Based on the data the portal will provide different map views that can be filtered in different ways. In our last phase, we will ask the pupils to answer a questionnaire where we will evaluate if this approach should be considered for use in history classes and especially for the topic of a culture of remembrance.

Our approach is aiming to encourage students to deal with the topic of a culture of remembrance, thus learning about history in an innovative way, which should bring lasting learning effects. We aim to contribute different insights to the educational scientific field. First, we want to show that we can use IT to link the process of historical with the promotion of media literacy. Second, we will use an established concept (research portals) and adapt it for our purpose to demonstrate that these portal-technologies can also be used for educational tasks. Third, through our our methodology we will generate new knowledge that is useful for planning IT supported history courses.

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