Considering the plurality of religious offers on the internet and an increasing presence of religion in the digital media, a religious media socialisation has to be assumed, in particular for young people. Today, people don’t just gain experience with religion in contact with their social but also in their digital environment. As a consequence the internet is a current field of research of religious education. While the first interest was aimed at issues of media ethics and competence, recently the focus shifted to questions of theory of learning and didactics.
Studies of religious education on the individual reception of media are up to now restricted to user surveys. In the seminar presented here, the students used three empirical methods that allow to analyse interactions on the internet.
In a process of explorative learning the sudents made the „new“ media their object of empirical research. In teams they used corpus linguistics, critical discourse analyses and netnography to analyse platforms on the web. Their research question was: How is the internet used as a room of religious articulation and communication? Which challenges and chances arise for digital processes of religious learning?