Editorial: Smart cities of the future: Creating tomorrow's education toward effective skills and career development today

Abstract

This special issue is dedicated to recent opportunities, perceptions, solutions and expectations that the emergent number of cities, exploiting the Smart City concept, face in designing and providing education that is striving to shape the new generation of the Smart Citizens. Smart Cities are improving the interconnection between citizens and with governments paying regard to shaping a new environment for the education of today's students for life in tomorrow's multifaceted technology-driven world. Various definitions that evolved from Digital City through Wireless City to Smart City and recently Smart City of the Future make us aware that technology and infrastructures are the leading aspect of the Smart City concept. The Smart City concept embraces not only various definitions but also diverse directions representing a collection that conveys many opportunities for educational arrangements. Viewed in this way, it builds the focus of this special issue illustrating the utilization of technologies, and methodology design experiences toward a Smart City setting by considering a wide-range of education and human performance development aspects, including new opportunities for learning and instruction, technology-enhanced learning, curriculum reform, assessment, skills development, and competence and knowledge management in a highly interconnected networked environment.