Accepted contributions
• Smartness of Learning Ecosystems and its bottom-up emergence in six European Campuses.
Carlo Giovannella, Diana Andone, Mihai Dascalu, Elvira Popescu, Matthias Rehm, Giuseppe Roccasalva
Each year a considerable amount of money is spent on the production of several national and international University rankings that may deeply influence the students’ enrollment. However, all such rankings are based almost exclusively on numerical indicators weakly related to the quality of the learning process and do not consider the perceptions of the “end users”: the learners. Recently, as part of the activity promoted by the Observatory on the Smart City Learning, we have produced an alternative approach to benchmark the learning ecosystems based on the satisfaction of the needs described by the Maslow’s Pyramid and on the achievement of the state of “flow” by the actors involved in the learning processes. Here we report on the first validation of such a benchmarking approach that has been tested in six European Campuses involving more than 800 students. The critical analysis of the outcomes allowed us, among other results, to identify the set of the most relevant indicators out of those that were initially proposed and the identification of a “smartness” axis on the plan of the first two principal components derived from a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) applied to the collected data.
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• Smart community energy initiatives in Smart Cities: Learning collectively about energy.
Jose J. Cavero Montaner, Gerd Kortuem, Stefan Foell
Community energy term involves different types of communities solving energy issues, including generation, energy use reduction, management and energy purchase, in many different ways. In this document we describe an approach to support the identification and creation of community energy initiatives in Milton Keynes. We discuss our initial design of an application that will facilitate the combining of multi-source urban information and will put advanced urban data analytics into the hands of communities. This tool will allow individuals and groups to learn about and reflect on energy use and future possibilities. To fully exploit this application, citizens must go through a learning process to understand the nature of the data, how to analyse the provided datasets and how to interpret the results.
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• The Zone of Possibility in Citizen Led ‘Hybrid Cities’
John Cook, Rik Lander, Terry Flaxton
The work reported in this position paper explores the development of citizen led ‘hybrid cities’ in which augmented and social web technologies mediate learning and innovation in what we term the Zone of Possibility. An example of a Hybrid Stokes Croft app is given early on to illustrate key concepts. The notion of a Zone of Possibility has been developed from theory into Design Principles to guide the participative development of smart services in a learning ecosystem. In the third section of this paper we unpack the concept of Zone of Possibility and related Design Principles so that they can act as a guide to future developments for citizen led hybrid cities locally and across the world.
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• Fostering young smart citizens through personal learning environments for urban inquiries
Alexandra Okada, Annika Wolff, Alexander Mikroyannidis
The aim of this qualitative study is to investigate how young citizens engage with urban inquiries activities on Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). This work analyses how educators can design and assess short inquiry activities as well as how students use a PLE to interact and collaborate for creating scientific questions. Participants of this qualitative study were 5 researchers from Higher Education, 2 science teachers and a class with 26 teenagers of a secondary school in the UK. The outcomes indicate the most popular pedagogical tools used by teachers and researchers, the most used co-inquiry components by learners, difficulties and recommendations for implementing urban inquiries through two open platforms: weSPOT and nQuire.
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• Bringing Data Literacy to UK Secondary Schools
Daniel Gooch, Annika Wolff, Jose Cavero
As data becomes an important part of everyday life, the ability for the average citizen to have some level of data literacy is increasingly important. With the rise of smart cities, citizens need to be able to understand and process the vast amounts of data being generated about them, their community and the city they live within. This paper describes an approach to teaching data skills in secondary schools using real life, complex, data sets collected as part of a smart city project. An inquiry-based methodology is applied to frame the activities. This paper describes the initial trial in a UK secondary school in which seventeen students aged 13-14 learnt about home energy consumption and the generation of solar energy from home solar PV, using smart meter data and satellite collected data that are currently part of smart city research. We discuss the appropriateness of our approach and what it means for developing web-based platforms designed to support teaching data skills in school.
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• Schools as driver of social innovation and territorial development: a systemic and design based approach.
Carlo Giovannella
This contribution is intended to describe the rationale of a project, in progress, that aims at recovering the centrality of the school through a systemic approach based on the Design as operative framework of reference capable to foster the acquisition of an adequate level of LIFE skills, an increase of the social capital and an appropriate level of participation aimed at achieving social and territorial development.
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