In the recent movement towards smart societies, smart governments supported by GovTech and smart cities developed through Civic Tech have become known as dominant structures enabled by information and communications technology. Since GovTech and Civic Tech share the goal of giving citizens better and safer lives through their engagement with government and technology, the development of online public services is characterized by the use of collaborative production methods involving various stakeholders and players. Open data, collaboration, and systematic teamwork are key to understanding this production of heterarchical structures. This study reviews previous cases of collaboration between GovTech and Civic Tech, identifies the dominant mechanisms of the smart society, and summarizes existing pedagogical and industrial theoretical systems, mindsets, and skillsets with the aim of developing content for a university course. Double loop learning, design thinking, the Agile methodology, and the lean principle are identified as theoretical systems. Our findings are arranged so that they can be applied in the content of a university-level educational technology course, which we designed to develop students’ transformative competencies to enable them to become active citizens. In addition, we compared the processes involved in observed theoretical systems and conventional pedagogical theories to clarify the differences in their mechanisms. We conclude with a discussion of the need to recognize frameworks of different paradigms to prepare students for transformative social activities.

This study examined the Communication Jigsaw as a novel, applied jigsaw strategy aimed to extend scholarly communication between university students. As the defining characteristic of the Communication Jigsaw, writing sheets were used as resources for reports and discussions. This documentation method enabled students to access all reports. In addition, a comment session was introduced to provide educational access to all subtopics. Contents were entrusted to each student and a student’s actuation for self-directed, deep learning appeared in the quality of their comments and their selection of reports for comment. All reports and commenting activities were facilitated by e-Learning technologies and monitored. Then, collected data were analyzed using social graphs. This study revealed that the comment session nurtured critical competencies toward applying acquired knowledge and finding information. Additionally, the Communication Jigsaw enabled the identification of outstanding performances among students and their connections. The Communication Jigsaw facilitated finding and analyzing the process of forming academic hubs and cliques within the scholarly community. The distribution spectrum of connections in the comment section did not conform to Gaussian distribution principles but rather the distinct distribution pattern characteristic of social communication. Taken together, this study showed a concrete example of lesson design and evaluation method to be adaptable to the flat world communication.