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. We describe the MASELTOV Incidental Learning Framework which will act as a boundary object to facilitate this process.

The influence of culture in IT governance implementation: a higher education multi case study

IT governance calls for the definition and implementation of formal mechanisms at the highest level in the organization taking into account structures, processes and relational mechanisms for the creation of business value from IT investments. Several factors can influence IT Governance implementation success. Culture is one of these factors and the one this research will focus on. Seen as probably the most difficult factors to change since it is grounded on practices performed over time, it should receive special attention. This article aims to analyze how culture can influence IT Governance implementation of structure, process and relational mechanisms in the context of higher education. Ten case studies in universities from three different countries: Brazil, Portugal and Netherlands were carried out. The purpose is the identification of relevant differences in IT Governance implementation among organizations from the following cultures: uncertainty avoidance and individualism. This article concludes by presenting key contributions, limitations and future work