Special Issue on Intelligent Environments in Education and Culture
of the journal Transactions on Future Intelligent Educational Environments

As the world moves steadily to become a knowledge-based economy, education and learning have never been more important. Technology is playing an increasingly crucial role in the delivery of education, which in turn is driving research into the search for ever better technological solutions. The age of intelligent environments is bringing such pedagogical advances as smart classrooms, intelligent campuses, immersive reality, affective learning, mobile learning, intelligent learning clouds and personalized intelligent avatar-like tutors to revolutionize current learning practices, and to challenge the traditional notion of a university or school. Likewise, culture is changing with a range of novel culture technologies, such as instrumented and augmented spaces, as well as contents and whole virtual worlds accessible through mobile technologies.
This special issue focuses on enriched physical and augmented environments such as smart classrooms and museums, virtual / mixed reality environments, intelligent learning clouds or mobile and augmented reality systems that can interact with students, teachers, and visitors at different levels, encoding pedagogical and cultural enrichment reflective of a student’s or visitor’s perception and thus providing enriching, novel ways of perception.
We will also include systems that support the learning of practical skills, such as those typified by science and engineering laboratories that are critical to students following a technology course, but also tools for vocational training, e.g. of nurses. We will also consider the wider campus infrastructure which can also impact the cost and effectiveness of education. Examples include smart signage that can guide people around a campus or smart applications for timetabling or managing the environment of the teaching facilities. Education is increasingly global and the cultural dimension is a topic we seek to include. In a similar vein, a further focus is on mobile technologies and instrumented spaces technologies for learning and training in developing countries.

About the journal
Transactions on Future Intelligent Educational Environments is a new open access journal targeting specifically the challenges and opportunities of intelligent educational environments. All papers accepted for this special issue will be both open access and published free of charge.
All papers should be submitted through the regular journal submission process. Templates for LaTeX and Word and further instructions for authors are available from the web page of the journal:
http://icst.org/future-intelligent-educational-environments/

Important Dates
January 16th: indication to submit (abstract)
February 20th: submission deadline
March 20th: first round of reviews
April 20th: submission deadline revised papers
May 20th: second round of reviews
June 30th: final version
Targeted publication date, Septermber 2014

Guest Editors
Hedda R. Schmidtke (Carnegie Mellon University, schmidtke@cmu.edu)
Nikoleta Yiannoutsou (University of Patras, nyiannoutsou@upatras.gr)
Theodora Vardouli (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thvard@mit.edu)