Carlo Giovannella

“Territorial smartness” and emergent behaviors

The increasing smarteness of personal devices and territories are rapidly changing the scenarios of data production. Data access and/or data possession can determine positions of privilege, but the real competitive advantage will derive more and more from the ability to identify relevant dimensions and flows and, of course, from that to extract meaningful multidimensional descriptions aimed at detecting and foreseeing emergent behaviors (particularly relevant those concerning small communities) or, in other words, from the ability to transform “big data” into”smart data”. Prerequisite for obtaining this goal is the identification of appropriate models and adequate spaces of representation that may inspire the development of appropriate strategies and methods of analysis. Few examples will be provided.

Beyond the Media Literacy: Complex Scenarios and New Literacies for the Future Education- The Centrality of Design

The advent of new media and web technologies made both contents and “containers†more “liquid†and requires an in depth reflection on the multi-facets concept of literacy in which the author tries to develop from an education point of view that can be defined as “experiential†. According to such reflection, in the present scenarios, the “design†becomes central to education, underlining the need of educational activities, which should include among their objectives the dissemination of what one may call “design literacy†.

Toward a General Model of the Learning Experience

In this paper we extend our previous bi-dimensional model of the experience - integrating experience styles and process characteristics - to account also for the peculiarities of the place. To each voxel of the resulting 3D space of representation can be associated a time dependent density that accounts for the relevance of such voxel at any time one takes a snapshot of the 3D space. Extrinsic and intrinsic forces (density gradients) are needed to make the system evolve from the initial state to a given final state (i.e. to origin the dynamics of educational processes).

User Experience of Kinect Based Applications for Smart City Scenarios Integrating Tourism and Learning

We present a study on the use of the Microsoft Kinect (Kinect) to implement interactive urban environments that integrate smart tourism and smart learning. The tests were carried out on a prototype containing a set of apps whose navigation was inspired by smart phones and tablets navigation. The results show that the quality of the interaction and of the overall user experience is already mature to allow for implementations in real-world settings.

MapEvaluator in action: a comparative test on the efficiency of the quantitative concept map evaluation in a primary school

In this paper we present a comparative study on the efficiency of the quantitative concept map evaluation - QCMP- performed in a primary school. Using Maptool we analyzed in a quantitative way the transformation of the concept map performed while delivering a didactic module on the human body. We have therefore compared the results of the analysis with those obtained from a traditional summative test based on a multiple choices questionnaire. Using this comparative analysis we were able to individuate an indicator that can be worked out in a self-consistent manner from the concept maps and that appears to be correlated to the results obtained from the summative test.

Smart Learning Eco-Systems: “fashion” or “beef”?

This article proposes to identify the smartness of a learning eco-system - physical and/or virtual - with its attractiveness that, in a people in place centered perspective, can be put in relation with the ability of the eco- system to meet needs and expectations of all categories of actors taking part in a given learning process and, finally, with the achievement of their state of “flow”. To follow, as an example of application of the concept of smart learning ecosystem, we present a brief description of salient aspects and features that characterize one of the most promising domain of investigation emerged recently - the smart city learning - together with a list of challenges and possible directions of research.

Transmission of vocal emotion: Do we have to care about the listener? The case of the Italian speech corpus EMOVO

The evaluation of emotionally colored non-sense sentences contained in the Italian vocal database EMOVO has been performed by means of a new testing tool based on the Plutchicks finite stated model of emotions. The validation of the corpus has been performed by taking into account also the ability of the listeners to recognize a given emotion. Such a detailed analysis allowed us to identify the unreliable listeners and to operate a more accurate assessment of the vocal database and of the speakers.

Evaluating the resilience of the bottom-up method used to detect and benchmark the smartness of university campuses

A new method to perform a bottom-up extraction and benchmark of the perceived multilevel smartness of complex ecosystems has been recently described and applied to territories and learning ecosystems like university campuses and schools. In this paper we study the resilience of our method by comparing and integrating the data collected in several European Campuses during two different academic years, 2014-15 and 2015-16. The overall results are: a) a more adequate and robust definition of the orthogonal multidimensional space of representation of the smartness, and b) the definition of a procedure to identify data that exhibits a limited level of trust.

Grand Challenge Problem 1: People Centered Smart “Cities” Through Smart City Learning

The increasing smartness of cities and territories is driving the change of all aspects of learning: places, processes, approaches and methods, contents, roles and skills. The grand challenge (GC) is to develop an adequate governance of such transformation and through learning disseminate a “person in place centered” perspective to inspire the design and development of smart cities that are inclusive and supportive of the whole complexity of the human being and where formal and informal learning agencies integrate and cooperate to foster social innovation.

“Smartness” as complex emergent property of a process. The case of learning eco-systems

In this paper we provide a framework useful to define and measure the perceived “smartness” of learning eco-systems of any kind and, more in general, of cities and territories. The proposed framework, inspired by Maslows pyramid of needs [18] and by the “flow” concept [6] helps to integrate bottom-up approaches and top-down ones and to develop a more person in place center vision of smart learning ecosystems. A vision that to be concretely actuated requires necessarily a collective commitment in order to carry on a process that, step by step, should lead to the achievement, and possibly maintenance, of an individual and urban/territorial state of flow, unavoidably grounded on the satisfaction of personal needs. To test the proposed framework, as a proof of concept, we have developed a first questionnaire that has been open to students for initial testing. Preliminary result are presented and discussed.