The potential impact of innovation on European knowledge societies as well as the importance to adopt innovative approaches in European education and training systems are recognised in the most recent EU policy documents (EU2020 and ET2020 among others), and the importance of ICT to support these processes is often described as paramount (IPTS 2012, Learnovation Report among others). Nevertheless, many studies on the role of ICT as a catalyst to change learning scenarios have failed to grasp relevant developments, and this - we believe - is hindering the full potential of ICT for learning in Europe and worldwide.

The starting point of the paper is that the reason for this is that most of ICT for learning research so far has concentrated on the development of ad hoc technologies for learning, failing to capture the potential adoption of emerging technologies not originally designed for learning in education and training environments and the innovative use that is made of technologies in non-formal and informal ways of learning and the extent to which this could be transferred/adapted to formal learning environments. On the contrary, this paper argues that if the areas of implicit, tacit and informal learning are not taken into consideration there is little chance to discover fundamentally new forms of learning through ICT.

The EU-FP7 HoTEL project (Hotlistic Technology Enhanced Learning) is adopting  this approach, looking for innovative practices in the use of technologies for learning (especially in non-formal and informal learning environments) that are often not sufficiently considered by research, believing that bottom-up innovation is playing an increasingly important role in the field of TEL that  might lead to new theories for learning. Further, the project is working to verify the impact of existing learning theories on TEL practices to determine whether this has led/is leading to innovation.

We believe that this is a crucial point, since the lack of an holistic approach in TEL as described above puts at risk the effectiveness and mainstreaming of new ways of using ICT for learning purposes: too often the timespan between the identification of technologies that have a potential for learning, the theoretical analysis of pedagogical implications, the piloting of such technologies and their adoption (first at small scale and then mainstreamed) is so long that the technology itself becomes out-dated compared to the changing environment and learning needs.

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