LOOKING FOR TRACES OF THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT: SUPPORTING WELL-BEING GROWTH FOR ALL

Smart Learning Ecosystems should perform at best on all the dimensions that contribute to the  well-being of students and all players involved in the development of a learning process: infrastructures, food, environment, info/admin services, mobility, safety, social interaction, satisfaction, challenges, self-fulfillment. Being inspired by the flow theory and by the Maslow’s pyramid, we can state that: ecosystems are smart when “individuals that take part in the local processes achieve a high level of skills and, at the same time, are also strongly motivated and engaged by continuous and adequate challenges, provided that their primary needs are reasonably satisfied”.

The smartness of learning ecosystems, thus, is not created merely through the availability of digital infrastructures and applications. When technologies are both available and adopted enthusiastically, they can start to make a difference in both simplifying and accelerating progress toward the achievement of system smartness. One has to keep in mind, however, that technologies are smart not because they are capable of replacing human reasoning but, rather because they can help towards achieving a people centered smartness, through streamlining mundane organisational tasks, and enhancing the skills of all actors involved in learning processes.

Our duty, with the help of technology, is to support learning ecosystems (formal, informal, non-formal) to develop their people centered smartness towards becoming incubators of social innovation and engines of sustainable regional development. Smartness is a goal and we can support our learning ecosystems along the process to achieve it by proposing solutions capable to solve or mitigate problems that prevent the learning ecosystems to be people centered.

We expect students, wishing to take part in the contest, to analyze their learning ecosystem, detect problems and find solutions that can help their, and as well other learning ecosystems, to get smarter.

Proposals submitted to this call are expected to address the same general themes of the call for papers of the conference, namely:

• places for smart education, 
• people in place centered design for smart education, 
• supportive learning technologies and tools for smart education.