Bucharest 2021, 24-25 June
After a first tour of Europe Timisoara (East), Aveiro (West) and Aalborg (North), Rome (South) and a virtual edition – SLERD 2020 – we hope to start a new journey so that the sixth edition of the SLERD conference will be held in Bucharest, in blended format. SLERD 2021 is organized by the University Politehnica of Bucharest and, as for previous editions, supported by ASLERD.
SLERD 2021 welcome researchers and practitioners from all over the world involved in the development of Smart Learning Ecosystems and Smart Education, as engines of social innovation and territorial development.
At the core, the adjective smart comprises terms like intelligent, purpose oriented, supportive, artful, clever and the like. Thus, smart does not necessarily includes the usage of technology (neither does it exclude technology!).
Smart referred to learning ecosystems in ASLERD and SLERD contexts, thus, does not simply means “technology enhanced” (to include expert systems or AI). The smartness is a more complex multilayered construct related to the wellbeing of the players operating in the ecosystems, that hopefully are also in relation with the territory (see Declaration of Timisoara, the wikipedia page of ASLERD, the proceedings of the previous SLERD conferences published by Springer (Aveiro, Aalborg, Rome , SLERD2020 on-line) and the special issues devoted to SLERD by IxD&A journal. Smartness 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: in short a design literacy from which to make emerge projects and processes capable to reify them, all aimed at achieving a people centered smart education, social innovation and territorial development.
