10th International Conference on Smart Learning Ecosystem and Regional Development

2025: a decade of SLERD: FACTS and future directions

12-13th of June (on-line)

After a first tour of Europe Timisoara (East), Aveiro (West) and Aalborg (North), Rome (South), two virtual editions – SLERD 2020 and SLERD 2021 – the second tour of Europe led us first in Bucharest (SLERD 2022), in Tallinn (SLERD 2023) and finally in Troyes (SLERD 2024). in 2025 the tenth edition will be organized in a fully on-line format by ASLERD, see the call for papers.

SLERD 2025 welcomes 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 include the usage of technology (neither does it exclude technology!).

Smart referred to learning ecosystems in ASLERD and SLERD contexts, thus, does not simply mean “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  and its updated version Declaration of Troyes or Timisoara 2.0; the proceedings of the previous SLERD conferences published by Springer (Aveiro, Aalborg, Rome , SLERD2020,  SLERD2021, SLERD 2022 on-line and SLERD 2023) and the special issues (N.16, N.17, N.20, N.27, N.31, N.35, N.39, N.43, N.47, N.51, N.55 and N.60 in progress) 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 needs 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.

Watch the video on the Youtube ASLERD channel