7th International Conference on Smart Learning Ecosystems and Regional Development

2022: TOWARDS THE POLYPHONIC CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW NORMALITY
July 5-6, 2022
Bucharest, Romania (blended)
slerd.uniroma2.it

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Deadline for paper submission: March 31, 2022
call for papers
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SLERD 2022 is organized by University Politehnica of Bucharest in collaboration with ASLERD.

The intention of the organizing committee is to hold SLERD 2022 as a hybrid conference with the possibility to alternatively attend it physically or virtually.

If the pandemic is not attenuated, SLERD will take place in a fully blown virtual conference format such as the previous two editions of SLERD.

Short Intro

After the shock of the pandemic, learning ecosystems – and in particular schools, universities, and territorial learning communities – all over the world – are facing a new phase characterized by the search for and the experimentation of ways to their “new normality“. This is within a world that seeks to protect at best and incentivize the economic recovery that although relevant is still subjected to enormous risks. Among the main areas on which most of the industrialized countries and Europe are focusing on, there are: the transitions towards a green and circular economy, smart digitization of the production processes, social innovation, active citizen participation supported by technologies, and, finally, the education for all. In such a context, collaboration is emerging as an approach and an attitude of considerable relevance that stays also at the basis of the polyphonic construction of the future of learning ecosystems.

Alongside collaboration, on the technological side, it continues to rise the relevance of intelligent systems, generically collected under the label of Artificial Intelligence (AI); concurrently, on the pedagogical side, competences have become the goal of future education, also in the attempt to close the skill gap, which represents one of the greatest dangers for the transition towards smarter productive systems and societies.

Competences and AI, by the way, are also topics that intersect and influence each other and rise questions of ethical nature. Last but not least, they are likely to require an organizational and didactic revolution of the learning ecosystems, thus requiring to question the possible consequences in order to build a more adequate future. In turn, this step requires inspiration from best practices to leverage the advantage of the growth of individuals and the expectations of the communities.

What should we expect for future learning ecosystems? How “smart learning ecosystems” are changing? How such changes may be related to the achievement of “a better learning for a better world” as a contribution to the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ? How will they contribute to the reduction of inequalities and, at the same time, to the empowering of each individual according to his expectations and talents?

Smart referred to learning ecosystems, in ASLERD and SLERD contexts, does not simply means “technology enhanced”. The smartness is a more complex multilayered construct related to the wellbeing of the players operating in the ecosystems and is affected by the improvement of any relevant aspects of the learning processes and ecosystem functioning, especially if connected with territorial development and social innovation.
Technologies are mediators. Hopefully they should be included but they are not a “sine qua non”.
The achievement of the learning ecosystems’ smartness is a process that need a long term vision, multidisciplinary competences, an attitude to understand people and contexts and to mediate point of views, a dynamic resilience to keep on track to achieve, step by step, the foreseen goals.

Topics of interests

SLERD 2022 is proud to invite colleagues – researchers and practitioners – from all over the world to share the efforts concerning the development of smart learning ecosystems and, contributions on how to build together a brilliant post pandemic future, where smart learning ecosystems and smart education will be even more central in the education of future citizens, and in the promotion of social innovation and territorial development.

can be grouped under three big themes:

places for smart education

• • future of institutional learning
  • interplay between formal and informal learning
  • new educational models and settings
  • continuity-discontinuity of time, technology, place/space, processes in learning
  • role of, and case studies of, games and gamification in smart education
  • dual education and other alternate scheme approaches
  • monitoring and benchmarking of smartness (individual, institution, city, region

people in place centered design for smart education

• • general frameworks and methodological advances
  • design, data and other relevant literacies
  • smart citizen’s literacies, skill and competences
  • communities and co-design in smart learning
  • sharing & participatory practices
  • open access to any resource and disparity
  • cultural influences

supportive learning technologies for smart education

• intelligent tutoring systems and interfaces
• semantic web technologies and applications
• text/opinion mining and sentiment analysis
• real/virtual communities and social network analysis
• interoperability and application of open/smart data and services
• safety & security in education
• IoT, ubiquitous and wearable technologies
• adaptability to educational contexts and citizens
• role of VR in education

Important dates:

• Deadline for papers submission: March 31, 2022
• Notification to the authors: April 30, 2022
• Camera ready paper: May 15, 2022
• Conference: July 5-6, 2022

Submissions:

SLERD welcomes short (max. 8 pages) and long contributions (max. 12 pages).

Papers should be written according to the Spinger Instruction for Authors of the  series Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies:
https://www.springer.com/us/authors-editors/conference-proceedings/conference-proceedings-guidelines

Link to the paper submission page on easy chair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=slerd2022

Join ALSLERD and share our vision on the future of Smart Learning Ecosystems: Timisoara declaration