Portable Technologies: Science Learning in Context

Education has traditionally studied the world by bringing it into the classroom. This can result in situated learning that appears to students to have no relevance outside the classroom. Students acquire inert, decontextualized knowledge that they cannot apply to real problems. The obvious solution to this shortcoming is to reverse the situation and bring the classroom to the phenomena: to learn in a rich, real-world context. The problem with the real world is that it is complex and filled with interactions that are hard to sort out. This text argues that the right tools might help students with this sorting process and result in learning in rich contexts. It provides an account of a series of experiments designed to explore the validity of this insight.