Our current age has been framed by the concept of the ‘information age’. Sometimes also known as the ‘computer age’. In a networked society as ours, digital technology has touched and changed many aspects of day-to-day life.  For example, many long-standing societal, business and institutional systems have either lost their relevance or have transformed beyond recognition, the music, banking and travel industries being excellent examples. Education does not stand untouched and we observe emerging and declining paradigms, changing expectations from society, our students now framed as consumers, with new and emerging types of informal learning experiences (take MOOCs for example) and all too frequently operating in unstable economic and policy environments.

The powerful combination of the ’information age’ and the consequent disruption caused by these unstable environments provides the impetus to look afresh and identify new models and approaches for education (e.g. OERs, MOOCs, PLEs, Learning Analytics etc.). For learners this has taken a fantastical leap into aggregating, curating and co-curating and co-producing outside the boundaries of formal learning environments – the networked learner is sharing voluntarily and for free, spontaneously with billions of people.

How do we as a community of educators respond to these directions? What could it mean for learning and the changing socio-economic demands of society?

We are set a challenge to really understand our learning environments. To create and invent responses that are possibly not even thought of yet.  Perhaps there are new business models, new policies, different ways to understand technological influences, new ways to interpret the collaborative and social-networked society that we live in: the learning environment, in its widest sense.

Following up on the results of the EDEN Research Workshop (RW8) in Oxford in 2014 and the Barcelona 2015 Annual Conference, a clear focus has been awarded to the expansion of emerging learning scenarios, identifying an ongoing shift towards greater attention to the importance of context in the learning process.

Join the Conference in Budapest to tell about your research, projects and experience!

Conference Publications include the electronic Conference Proceedings of double peer reviewed accepted conference submissions and  the CC licensed Book of Abstracts.