Interaction Design and Architecture(s) (IxD&A) - Invitation - Special Issue on Smart City Learning: Opportunities and Challenges

During the last decade the promotion of news ways to teach and learn has been dramatically influenced by the use of ICT. The increased levels of flexibility and engagement provided by the intensive use of mobile and ubiquitous ICT, social media, virtual and augmented reality has fostered the adoption of new learning models in formal contexts. The impact of ICT in learning in informal contexts is also very relevant due to the increased presence of ICT in all aspects of our daily life. To better represent the influence of ICT in lifelong learning, and in line with authors such as Luciano Floridi, we may say that current ICT enable not just online learning but actually onlife learning.

The development of the Internet of Things (IoT), or the Internet of Everything, is paving the way to new generations of learning applications and services, due to the expected increase in the capacity of interaction IoT will provide. An intensively technologically mediated territory increases the learning possibilities with strong potential impact both in formal and informal contexts. This infrastructural backbone supports the vision on Smart Cities by influencing and improving key factors like mobility, environment, people, quality of life and governance. In Smart Cities, learning is not only a way to train an adequate human capital, but becomes one of the driving forces of the “smartness” and well being of a community. Unavoidably the underlying and ubiquitous techno-ecosystems - whose embedded intelligence, sensitivity and responsiveness surround the individuals - challenge the future of learning and call for a redefinition of spaces, contents, processes, skills and assessment approaches.

The special issue of IxD&A aims at sharing research papers discussing innovative opportunities and challenges on Smart City Learning. Exploratory, case study and prototype evaluation papers are welcome.

The workshop and the special issue are supported by the Association for Smart Learning Ecosystems and Regional Development (ASLERD) established to influence the development of this area from an international perspective. The special issue is however open to anybody interested.

Topics of Interests

• Models of learning experiences in Smart Cities 
• Learning spaces for formal and informal learning
• Boundaries between formal and informal learning
• Technological, pedagogical, social challenges to learning in smart cities
• Techno-ecosystem for Smart City Learning
• Novel approaches to learning and scenarios
• Ubiquitous computing for learning
• Gamification and serious/educational games in the Smart City
• Experiences and models for social learning in the Smart City
• Digital literacy for Smart City Learning
• Geo-localities and cultural effects
• Success and fiasco stories
• Privacy, Data Control and Security issues for Smart City learning
• Ecological monitoring and Analytics for Smart City Learning
• Empirical research and investigations related to ICT usage and future trends

Guest Editors

Monica Divitini, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

Paloma Diaz Perez, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain

Fernando Ramos, Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal

Important dates

• Deadline: November 20, 2015
• Notification to the authors: January 15, 2016
• Camera ready paper: February 10, 2016
• Publication of the special issue: end of February, 2016

Submission procedure 

All submissions (abstracts and later final manuscripts) must be original and may not be under review by another publication.

The manuscripts should be submitted anonymized either in .doc or in .rtf format. 
All papers will be blindly peer-reviewed by at least two reviewers. Perspective participants are invited to submit a 8-14 pages paper (including authors' information, abstract, all tables, figures, references, etc.). 
The paper should be written according to the IxD&A authors' guidelines .

More information on the submission procedure and on the characteristics of the paper format can be found on the website of IxD&A Journal the where information on the copyright policy and responsibility of authors, publication ethics and malpractice are published.

For scientific advices and for any query please contact the guest-editor:

• fernando.ramos [at] ua.pt [dot] trigueiros [at] gmail [dot] com

• divitini [at] idi.ntnu.no

• pdp [at] inf.uc3m.es

marking the subject as: 'IxD&A special issue on: Smart City Learning''.