A Citizen-Centred Approach to Education in the Smart City: Incidental Language Learning for Supporting the Inclusion of Recent Migrants

Smart cities are often developed in a top-down approach and designers may see citizens as bits within data flows. A more human-centred perspective would be to consider what the smart city might afford its citizens. A high speed, pervasive network infrastructure offers the opportunity for ubiquitous mobile learning to become a reality. The MASELTOV project sees the smart city as enabling technology enhanced incidental learning: unplanned or unintentional learning that takes place in everyday life, in any place, at any time, with the city itself the context and the prompt for learning episodes. Migrants in particular will benefit: limited in their opportunity to attend formal education yet with a pressing need for language learning to support their integration. Incidental learning services, like smart city planning, need interdisciplinary communication for successful development. The authors describe the MASELTOV Incidental Learning Framework which will act as a boundary object to facilitate this process.