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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.]

1Boy Crusoe

By Allan Eric

Also published as" A Yankee Crusoe" . A 15 year old hard working and studious farm boy finds the lure of adventure on the seas as a merchant seaman more than he can resist. This is his story. " I was born in a little town in the State of Maine, near the close of the Civil War. My boyhood life did not differ materially from that of the average farmer's son in the remote country districts of New England--except, perhaps, that I read more and thought more. Hard work on the rugged soil, two terms each year in the little yellow country schoolhouse, a day's fishing now and then filled the early years of my life full to over-flowing. " What he gets is enough excitement and adventure to overflow his wildest dreams. How he experiences disaster and uses his wits and knowledge to overcome every problem makes for a great read. - Summary by Phil Chenevert