Opening up smart learning cities – building knowledge, interactions and communities for lifelong learning and urban belonging

Abstract

This paper revisits issues arising from prior research carried out by the author examining citizen informal learning through interactions with the real world via augmented reality interfaces triggering place based knowledge. Topics discussed in this paper were not part of the research yet deserve further discussion in that context. Two areas are of particular interest: place based digital knowledge content delivery and user generated content related to place. In other words, how users might freely and easily access knowledge content that relates to features and places they pass through or live in, and how they might digitally interact with their local environment to contribute to a community of memory associated with place [39 30, 29]. This compiling of the knowledge archive of place, both expert and citizen generated, might be described as the reading and writing of the city, somewhat like [26] or [19], reflecting ideas going back to the Berkeley Community Memory bulletin-boards of the 1970s [7]. Discussion includes the concept of community mapping, briefly examining examples from literature and a prototype, the ‘Learner Feedback Map’, developed by the author but not used in the final research. The challenges of finding and delivering knowledge content, and of uploading and hosting user-generated content are briefly considered in the context of decentralised networks and the Fediverse.