12th International Conference on Smart Learning Ecosystem and Regional Development
2027: design learning ecosystems: interactions, co-design, and adaptive futures
24th-25th of May (mixed mode)
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), in Troyes (SLERD 2024). and finally in Craiova (on-line format SLERD 2025), the third one started in 2026 with the full on-line version of Strathclyde ad will continue with the twelfth edition organized again in a fully on-line format by the University of Siena (Italy – Santa Chiara Lab, see the call for papers.
The unprecedented social, technological, environmental, and cultural transformations of our time call for a renewed understanding of learning ecosystems. As artificial intelligence, data-driven technologies, and hybrid physical-digital environments increasingly permeate our world, future learning ecosystems should not only become more intelligent; they should become more ecological, equitable, ethical and inclusive to become a driver for systemic transformations. Future ecosystems should cultivate adaptive relationships among people, technologies, institutions, communities, and the living world. Designing these ecosystems requires learning not only from humans but also from the organizational principles of nature, where resilience emerges through diversity, interdependence, and continuous adaptation.
This call promotes an ecosystem perspective on learning as a dynamic and evolving network of human and non-human actors, technologies, institutions, practices, values, and places that collectively shape learning experiences through:
• Interactions rather than isolated entities. Learning emerges from the quality of relationships among learners, educators, communities, intelligent technologies, institutions, and environments. Understanding and designing these interactions is essential for fostering meaningful learning experiences.
• Co-dependence between living and non-living components. Human actors, AI systems, digital infrastructures, learning spaces, policies, artifacts, and natural environments are mutually interdependent. Learning ecosystems are therefore socio-technical and increasingly more-than-human, requiring design approaches that acknowledge multiple forms of agency and intelligence. These perspectives encourage designers to learn from the adaptive strategies, communication mechanisms, and cooperative behaviours found in natural ecosystems, inspiring new approaches to resilience, collective intelligence, and sustainable learning environments. Rather than viewing nature simply as a context for learning, this perspective recognizes ecological systems as active sources of knowledge for designing future learning ecosystems.
• Continuous adaptation. Learning ecosystems are never static. They evolve through feedback, experimentation, co-design, and collective learning. Their resilience depends on the capacity of their actors and infrastructures to continuously adapt to emerging challenges, technologies, and societal transformations.
More in general SLERD 2027, as for the past editions, 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, N.60, N.62 and N. 67) 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