A Point of View on New Education for Smart Citizenship

Smart cities and intelligent communities have an ever-growing demand for specialized smart services, applications, and research-driven innovation. Knowledge of users’ profiles, behavior, and preferences are a potentially dangerous side effect of smart services. Citizens are usually not aware of the knowledge bases generated by the IT services they use: this dimension of the contemporary and digital era sheds new light on the elements concerning the concept of citizenship itself, as it affects dimensions like freedom and privacy. This paper addresses this issue from an education system perspective, and advances a non-technical methodology for being aware and recognizing knowledge bases generated by user-service interaction. Starting from narratives, developed in natural language by unskilled smart service users about their experience, the proposed method advances an original methodology, which is identified in the conceptual models derived from these narratives, a bridge towards a deeper understanding of the informative implications of their behavior. The proposal; which is iterative and scalable; has been tested on the field and some examples of lesson contents are presented and discussed.