Creating new Public Spaces for Learning

A learning community can be driven by strong initiatives to create new physical and digital spaces for learning in the community, spaces that often facilitates intergenerational meetings.

Although learning communities are not directly about citizens’ learning, learning opportunities can be a strong driver for emerging learning communities.
Such a driver might be based on innovative ideas of learning, such as:

• Offering learning opportunities outside the formal education system
• Offering learning outside the traditional classroom
• Offering learning for all citizens
• Offering more non-formal and informal learning to citizen’s
• Developing creative settings and frameworks for learning

A special version of such learning innovation in the community is the idea of allowing learning to happen openly, visibly and in public spaces.
Such initiatives require strong collaboration between many stakeholders in the community, for instance educations, public authorities, health centres and subject-professionals, and therefore these initiatives produce a wide range of networking opportunities that could be cultivated into sustained learning community infrastructures.
At the same time the open spaces learning initiatives by definition reach out to all kinds of citizens (from children to elderly), and in certain cases it is indeed possible to include interested citizens in more sustained community activities.

The challenges and possible threats to such open spaces initiatives are:

• They are deeply dependent on public authorities and their sustained dedication, as they “own” the public spaces
• Activities with high visibility do not automatically lead to creation of new collaboration infrastructures, as the activities might be regarded ad hoc initiatives by some stakeholders
• Meeting all kinds of citizens does not automatically lead to organisation of these citizens in sustained community activities

 However, the open spaces approach offers much potential, if:

• Shared community ownership to public spaces is possible and can be further developed
• The ad hoc collaboration can be given sustainable perspectives and lead to permanent infrastructures of collaboration and communication
• The activities succeeds in organizing interested groups of citizens and the involved organisations are able to facilitate their further community involvement

SPECIAL RECOMMENDATIONS
It is urgent for the public authorities to consider their different roles in such collaborations and to sustain their credibility for future collaboration and initiatives.

Xploit project results in Italian:

Xploit – una comunita’ che apprende

Xploit – cambiare i ruoli

Xploit – innovazione nelle comunita’

Xploit – i risultati di 3 anni di lavoro

Xploit – guide per una comunita’ che apprende

Xploit – cosa offre xploit

Xploit – exploitation… e oltre