Heather D Crawley, Sunraysia Institute of TAFE
Smart Communities and Learning Towns. These are terms that many of people in this country are still unfamiliar with. They describe a response from the North America and the United Kingdom to support communities in meeting the challenges of communications technology and the knowledge age.
In July of 2001 I was fortunate to be given the opportunity to research the Smart Community model in the United States and Canada as part of an ANTA Flexible Learning Leader Scholarship. I spent four weeks in North America interviewing Smart Community experts and practitioners, and upon my return, I undertook a study of the Australian model, which is based on the UK model of Learning Cities.
There is much we in Australia can learn from a study of these two models, their similarities and their differences. On both sides of the Atlantic, communities are seeking new ways to extract economic advantage and to increase social cohesion using partnerships and lifelong learning as fundamental to community success, and using of technology to underpin it all. However, in North America, Smart Communities have evolved with the focus on technology. The UK on the other hand has created Learning Cities that have Lifelong Learning as their central focus.
These two different interpretations of the Smart Community concept have far reaching implications for how Smart/ or Learning Town development has been played out in Australia.
This paper examines how they have evolved and the implications for Australia.