Smart Learning Ecosystems - Design as cornerstone of smart educational processes and places

Abstract

In a people-centered perspective, to get smart, a learning ecosystem has to undergo a long evolutionary process involving a combination of co-design, participatory evaluation, and empowering steps, among other things. In this light, design literacy becomes the cornerstone for enabling and supporting this evolutionary path. Digital technologies are expected to act as empowering agents of multidimensional human well-being on that path, helping learning settings recover their central role in educating future citizens and in fostering social innovation and territorial development [1,2]. Concretizing this vision means also contributing to the reification of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [3]. However, this is no easy task since, as UNESCO itself suggests, it involves questioning the future of "places" and learning processes, teacher education and training, learning accessibility and all those elements that can ensure learning ecosystems safeguard the well-being of the actors involved and sustain social innovation. In the organic era of interaction dominated by the pervasive presence of devices and networks, achieving SDG 4 Quality Education, one has also to take into consideration the digital world and the skills associated with it. This notwithstanding, technologies that can in principle offer ’unlimited’ possibilities are also harbingers of important criticalities, above all the sustainability of the "digital" itself. Until now, there has been little discussion on these issues, not to mention a paucity of investigations about the interplay between digital and other competences. The digital world tends to be perceived and experienced as substitutive of reality (or at least as a discrete parallel channel), not so much as truly integrated with the physical world. Consequently, digital skills tend to be considered as those that allow you to be a successful "citizen" of the virtual world. Never before as in these pandemic-ridden times should reflections on virtuality be so prominent in the debate on such issues, with focus on their relevance for the smartness of learning ecosystems that by force majeure need to maintain connection with physical reality. Never before as in this moment must we ask ourselves what impact educational technologies have on learning ecosystems and processes, albeit virtualized ones. Technologies have ensured continuity probably thanks to the centrality of the human component, which has been able to repurpose technologies that were originally designed for socializing and collaborative work in order to support learning processes. Never as in this moment is it so appropriate to ask ourselves what is essential and what is not, what generates impact and what can be wiped out as if it had never existed, what real possibilities we have to increase the smartness of a learning ecosystem so as to achieve "better learning for a better world", as stated in the Timisoara Declaration [4]. Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal IxD&A, N.43, 2019-20, pp. 5 7