The purpose of this thesis is to outline a design for a Learning Environment in a newly built Technical High school: Zealand Business College in Vordingborg. The premise for the Design is to eliminate the use of traditional books and to enhance Collaborative Learning.
The platform is a CSCL milieu, where Tablet-PC´s have substituted; Bookshelves, pencil cases, and a general (multimedia) Toolbox. As Tablet-PC, the Apple iPad was chosen. The aim of the design, is to take learning into a more motivating context, offering students the ability to communicate and collaborate 24/7. That implies digital editions of ordinary school books to be avoided. Instead a digital flow is pursued, from teacher handout to student evaluation.
Through a wide-angled analysis with didactical, pedagogical, and technical observations plus specific Action-based experiments; the pre-design is outlined under user-driven influence coming from a focus group-interview with students having used iPads as their learning devices. A second design-round constitutes a full list of requirements as part of the Design.
Standard Learning context proves to be inadequate and the bokless High-school is designed to accommodate pedagogical methods of Problem Based Learning and Discovery Learning. These two methods within the CSCL-context, are synthesized into: Reality Based Learning.
Three major implications in the design have shown; The necessity to eliminate not only paper books but paper in general, Interactive Whiteboards to be avoided as classroom presentation tools and that iPads with their hidden filesystems have difficulties to deliver files to arbitrary Learning Management Systems.
Key-words: Social Constructivism, Connectivism, Reality Based Learning, Problem Based Learning, VLE, PLE, SAMR, Tablet-PC, iPad, Digital flow