Shifting Contexts: Investigating the Role of Context in the Use of Ubiquitous Computing for Design-Based Learning

In design teaching ubiquitous technologies can offer new ways of situating learning within real world experiences. Yet they require new types of knowledge; both an understanding of how to work with the technology and also an understanding of how to use the technologies to respond to changing contexts such as the place and the people. We sought to understand the factors affecting how students work with the acquiring these broader knowledge bases and how this impacted on the learning outcomes in design-based learning. In this paper we discuss an approach to tertiary design teaching that involves the use of ubiquitous technologies to support fieldwork and in-situ learning and through this we evaluate the impact on teaching and learning. We will describe the methods of the study, which involved pre- and postinterviews and questionnaires completed by individual students, focus groups as well as analysis of the outcomes of the student projects. We will explore how a series of different contexts framed and affected the learning experience by exploring the context as location, technology and social setting. Since the projects required students to not only use ubiquitous technologies as tools for learning, but also as components of the design project outcomes we also highlight a series of short case studies of student project outcomes to analyse how the students integrated them into their learning environments. In the discussion of the results we will focus on how the context of the learning was understood by the students, and we will discuss an evaluation of how this changed during the course of the teaching project. [For the complete proceedings, see ED557171.]