Using internet radio to break-down the boundaries for inclusion into smart cities

Abstract

Although ‘Smart Cities’ is an enticing and progressive concept and metaphor for conceiving and designing socio-technical educational systems in the 21C, clear examples of how this might be realised in practice are only just emerging. Similarly, although few would disagree with the desire to incorporate into our ‘learning designs’ notions such as ‘person in place’, ‘smartness and well-being of communities’ and the need for 21C thinking and literacy skills, where these concepts are located and where they are actualised is often opaque. This article presents a clear and somewhat radical example of how ‘smart city’ notions can be articulated and also used to challenge conventional norms about ‘who is smart’. It does this through describing the implementation and evaluation of RadioActive101, an international internet radio hub that is an educational intervention which gives a voice to disenfranchised groups in mostly urban areas throughout Europe, with a particular focus on at-risk and unemployed young people. This paper will describe this project along with its strikingly positive evaluation so far, which questions, in our digital age, some of the tenets of traditional education, and the boundaries for who can become agents of positive social change within our developing smart cities