Editorial

Abstract

From November 23 to November 24, 2017, the second symposium on technical teaching and learning organized by the editors of the Journal of Technical Education (JOTED) and hosted by the University of Siegen took place in the Artur-Woll House. As JOTED editors and event organizers, this symposium was even more exciting to us than the first one in 2016: Rather than simply coming together for a one-time event as in 2016, this symposium was about establishing a format. The idea of continuing the symposium originated from conversations we had at the first symposium and from its wrap-up in the aftermath when we held an editorial board meeting for JOTED. It was in that meeting that a new vision was born: We intended to turn the symposium as a one-time event into an annual series so that it would add to the discipline-specific conference formats already in place. By facilitating contact points for cross-disciplinary researchers, we intended the symposium to propel scientific discussions and exchange on the diverse aspects of technical teaching and learning. We were therefore relieved about the many responses to our call for papers. In total, we had received twice as many abstracts as we could accept for the symposium. In order to meet the demand and do justice to a whole range of interesting research foci, we decided to implement a new poster-format in addition to the presentation program. As the number of registrations had doubled, too, we were sure that concurrent conference lines would help us to live up to these numbers.