Social Mindedness in Learning Community. Concepts, Fieldwork and Exploratory results

The problematic condition affecting a huge part of the late modern society translates the global crisis into the educational experience and in daily life dimension of socialization. This awareness has been rooted into the motivation of SMILEY (Social Mindedness In LEarning communitY) project presenting an “exit strategy” based upon the centrality of the social dimension of development, expressed by cultural values, social cohesion, solidarity and respect for gender equality: examples of what “Social Mindedness” means for the European society. The evolution of the traditional web has given a strong input to the development of e-learning technologies, suggesting a roadmap to collaborative learning within the school. The virtual environment, in which connections among people are established as well as connections among information objects, permits the evolution of the educational systems through the re-inventing of tools for learning, thanks to the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) in education. The SMILEY experience, described in this volume, aims to shed an operative light upon this core issue describing the project, its founding elements and its interlocutory results.