Communications and Marketing
Jette jetting around the world
H-BRS: Ms Bakemeier, you were spotted at the "Shaping the Digital Future" theme week of the Hochschulforum Digitalisierung in Berlin by our representative for university didactics, Andrea Schröder. You presented the "can phone", the prototype of a network app for students. How did this come about?
Jette Bakemeier: During my internship at Messe Berlin in the International Consumer Electronics Fair (IFA) project team, I made a friend who works at the Impact Hub Berlin. She suggested that I apply for the #HackYourCampus event, which was to take place on the premises and in collaboration with the Impact Hub as part of the University Forum's theme week. I then became part of a team of five students, economists and computer scientists. Together, we came to the conclusion that students are not networked well enough with their peers when it comes to studying, especially across semesters. Existing platforms are not used for various reasons, which is why we then developed our solution approach, the network prototype.
H-BRS: The "can phone"...
Bakemeier: Yes, that's what we called the prototype. The can phone is intended to be a web app for information-based exchange between students; on the one hand, questions - usually related to studies - are asked by students in a chat forum and answered by their fellow students, but lecture documents are also made available, for example. The second element is an unofficial student events calendar, which is maintained jointly by the student councils and the students.
H-BRS: What brought you to Berlin?
Bakemeier: I spent a semester abroad at the Nanaimo campus of Vancouver Island University in Canada and then applied for an internship towards the end of my stay. Working for the Internationale Funkausstellung in Berlin simply appealed to me.
H-BRS: What makes studying in Canada different from studying in Germany?
Bakemeier: Simply everything. The differences are so great that it's hard to decide where to start.
H-BRS: Try it.
Bakemeier: All right. At first, the courses were smaller and the lectures were much more interactive. There was a lot of homework and assignments that you had to hand in throughout the semester. Living together on campus was also much more intense, there were many more opportunities to get involved, do sports or meet new people. For example, there were lots of little messages like "Give someone a compliment" all over campus in one week. And there was a very comprehensive online learning platform called D2L, which was also used for all organisational and bureaucratic matters. Similar to LEA, only more integrated, fewer department-specific subsystems. This platform worked really well and was also presented at the themed week of the University Forum on Digitalisation in Berlin.
H-BRS: I'm beginning to suspect where the idea for the can phone came from. But back to everyday life: you're now back in Rheinbach, at the start of the 7th semester and your Bachelor's thesis is due. What will it be about?
Bakemeier: The topic of the bachelor's thesis will have something to do with the connection between imitative behaviour and empathy, but I don't know the details yet.
H-BRS: How did you come up with the idea? What do you mean by imitative behaviour?
Bakemeier: The idea came to me when I read an article about the relationship between actors and spectators during my semester abroad. It was about how the audience unconsciously imitates the facial expressions of an actor and thus mirrors the emotions conveyed. So when Julia Roberts grins in a film, I grin too, without noticing it at first. The article also said that it is usually empathetic people who tend to display this behaviour.
H-BRS: Mrs Bakemeier, thank you very much for talking to us.
(The interview was conducted by Juri Küstenmacher)
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