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The purpose of this paper is to describe the relevant role of users/learners as designers/creators of meaningful and effective learning places and spaces in both digital and virtual worlds.

The paper is based on research and observation of changing trends in users' behavior in physical and digital collaborative workplaces and spaces all over the world.

In this third millennium, the new spirit of knowmadic workers and learners is breaking down old design concepts and rules. The progressively more subtle frontier between virtual and physical learning environments and working environments is changing the use by, and the behavior of, learners in these places and spaces. In this context, the transversal‐thinking, designer‐guided paradigm is rendered effectively useless. The era of user‐led design has started. User‐oriented design is an old trend; it has changed over time. In societies and economies based on learning, reflection and constant collaboration, the individualistic design guru has no place.

This paper discusses the evolving strategic role of users/learners as designers and co‐creators of their own places. Traditional design criteria and theories are outdated. The role of the designer as master/creator is not compatible with the collegiate and collaborative, reflective spirit of knowmadic learners. A consequence is a requirement for new strategies and a redefinition of the designer's role in the creation of space. The axis of design control has shifted.

The aim in this paper is to extend Dorothy Smith's conceptual understanding of work to consider the emerging labor of “knowmads” within internationalization of higher education. Through original research on everyday experiences of internationalization, the authors seek to illuminate the ways individuals develop skills and competencies in relation to these new forms of work in order to address the reproduction of inequities. The authors make a connection between internationalization of higher education and knowmadic labor based on the premise that cross‐border education is often pursued in order to develop knowmadic attributes.

Through a critical institutional ethnography of one mid‐sized Canadian university, the paper uses survey and interview data gathered from students and faculty ‐ individuals who are involved in knowmadic labor connected to internationalization – to illustrate some of the study participants' daily experiences of internationalization coordinated by the institutional structures of the university in times of globalization.

It is concluded that internationalization and connecting new forms of work involved in becoming and producing knowmads not only bypass and disregard present inequities in higher education, but work to reproduce them in new ways.

The paper provides insight in regards to processes and allocation of work within internationalization, while addressing forms of social inequities that often cut across these practices and concludes with brief comments on the implications of academic knowmadic labor in Western higher education institutions engaged in internationalization.

While research has been conducted on work in international contexts, little has addressed “the labor” that is involved in becoming knowmads, and that of “producing” knowmads. The paper draws connections between the internationalization of higher education and knowmadic work showing that knowmadic labor is often preceded by knowmadic educational opportunities. The cosmopolitan vision of creating globally aware citizens, with international knowledge, skills, and competencies that institutions espouse, are assumed to be good per se, and to lead to knowmadic qualities and attributes required in a knowmad society. The paper questions these assumptions and the relations of power on which they rest.

This essay aims to introduce the “knowmads” concept in the context of converging futures of work, learning, and how people relate to one another in a world driven by exponential, accelerating change.

A conceptual framework for understanding knowmad society is presented, with specific insight to how it impacts formal education systems. A summary of articles following this viewpoint in this issue of On the Horizon is presented to highlight key ideas and how the issue is structured.

Knowmad society is already here, but education systems seem ignorant of this reality. This essay highlights that in this issue, ideas, approaches, and original solutions are offered for further discussion.

It is too late to ignore the trends driving the creation of a knowmad society, and it has to be decided if there is to be an attempt to catch‐up to the present, or leapfrog ahead and create future‐relevant learning options today. Otherwise there is a risk of producing workers equipped for the needs of previous centuries, but not the kind that can apply their individual knowledge in contextually‐varied modes to create new value.

This essay presents a formal introduction to the knowmad concept, and calls for the co‐creation of a broader ecology of options for relevant learning in a knowmad society.

The aim is to explore the role of personal learning environments in an already ICT‐dense context and in combination with some educational approaches in the field of technology enhanced education. The paper seeks to analyze how personal learning environments are not a device but a learning strategy that threatens the way educational institutions and their functions are understood, by contributing to enable a borderless learning society.

The research begins by revisiting Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development and assesses the role of educators and educational institutions as the actual more knowledgeable others in scaffolding learners' learning paths. This role is put in relationship with different learning scenarios (formal, non‐formal, informal and autodidactic) according to their inner structure (or lack of) and degree (or absence) of planning. The research then puts PLEs in relationship with other “physical” spaces (VLEs and LMSs), the digitization of content (open educational resources), records and assessments (e‐Portfolios) and the possibility to flip some traditional tasks or processes that enabled regaining the social component in the classroom (Education 2.0).

It is suggested that PLEs have come to close the circle of ICTs in education with a highly transformative power: the power to blur the boundaries between formal teaching and informal learning. Indeed, the traditionally difficult transition from one learning scenario to a different one has been made smoother by the appearance of OER and, especially, social media constructs that can be used for learning purposes, especially within a PLE‐based strategy.

It is stated that institutions should embrace and even foster the possibility that learners could easily and intensively switch educational resources, just like they could shift among different registers and learning scenarios, as a newly enabled way to tear down the artificial divisions that formal learning edified.