Collaborative Smart Eco-School Systems: A Synced-Unsynced Framework for Complex Educational Systems

• In Event: Rethinking Schools in a (Post-?)Pandemic World: Innovative Conceptualizations of Schools as Organizations

Abstract

New and innovative educational frameworks are aimed at developing a societal model of growth that can address the current and future global and local crises in education. This produces a paradoxical reality of educational institutions that are expected to develop innovative frameworks in an environment based on both accountability (global unification) and survival (local particularization). In our conceptualization focused on knowledge creation, the collaborative smart eco-school system reflects an ecosystem of digitalized learning networks, connections, collaboration, and knowledge in all forms involving all actors in the schools’ ecosystem. The collaborative smart eco-school systems will be based on knowledge creation, providing a platform for knowledge sharing among all stakeholders in the system. The proposed model seeks a transformation of educational institutions, shifting away from the hierarchical school models and towards a unique, collaborative eco-school system in which residents, industries, schools, universities, and research centers can create new and inventive products, services, and solutions. Contrary to the traditional mechanist top-down approach to education in which only two types of shareholders contribute (service provider and service receiver), a collaborative smart eco-school system consists of a variety of key people and stakeholders involved in public and private spending, creation, education, research, leisure, and professional activities. This synchronization among various interest groups is an intermittent phenomenon characterized by the repeated assembly and disassembly of meaning-knowledge in accordance with the shifting tasks and challenges faced by the system. With changing task demands, a repeated assembly and disassembly, synced-unsynced, of different functional units provides the coordination necessary to perform a particular task. In this paradigm, social processes do not represent the output of static structures (service provider and service receiver), but rather represent inherently dynamic systems of assembly and disassembly (synced-unsynced) to achieve coherent functioning. Achieving educational improvement requires that key actors develop synced-unsynced interpretations of educational aims and functions in various contexts. That is, individually and collectively, a synced-unsynced strategy based on knowledge creation can build collaborative smart eco-school systems.

Authors

• Pascale Sarah Benoliel, Bar-Ilan University
  Presenting Author

• Chen Schechter, Bar-Ilan University
  Presenting Author