A critical approach to ICT to support participatory development of people centered smart learning ecosystems and territories

Abstract

This contribution aims at fostering a collaborative effort by relevant stakeholders - policy makers, entrepreneurs, researchers, teachers, students, etc. – to critically explore the role of ICT in supporting a participatory development of people-centered "smart" learning ecosystems, able to produce social capital and to drive social innovation and territorial development. All this assuming that: a) it can help in identifying the driving factors that in the past have produced time and space singularities (eg. Renaissance, Belle Epoque, Big Deal, etc.) capable to attract people to experience a collective state of "flow”; b) the smartness of a learning ecosystems is strongly correlated with that of its region of reference; c) smartness is an emergent property of any entity that interacts with ICT infrastructures but is not fully determined by this latter. Unavoidably, all this also implies a reflection on the interplay between globality and locality and, as well, virtuality and physicality.