Reclaim @ ILTA Annual Conference 2026
This year we are excited to take part in a whole host of open education conferences, starting with EdTech Conference 2026 – EdTech You: Digital Learning From How to Who, from June 3-4.
This year, the Irish Learning Technology Association’s annual EdTech conference takes place in Dublin hosted by Dublin City University and we're excited to have two sessions in the programme as well as supporting the event as a sponsor.
We're looking forward to an inspiring line up of keynote speakers, research and practice sessions as well as the unique GASTA sessions, to seeing familiar faces and making new connections.
If you are attending the event, look out for us at the Donkey Kong coffee table and play a round with us!
Preview what we'll be talking about
Jim's session Ooh Blogging is a Place on Earth on June 4, will explore the question "What if blogging were understood not merely as an online publishing tool, but as a place on Earth?".
"For many of us in educational technology, blogging has long been framed as digital writing, content creation, or reflection within networked systems. Yet over time, it has become entangled with platform logics—metrics, visibility, virality, and algorithmic amplification—that distance it from lived experience and local community. This session proposes a different framing: blogging as a situated, embodied, place-based practice.
Drawing on the development of bava.studio—a physical storefront and cultural experiment in Trento, Italy—this talk explores what happens when a blog is grounded in a material location. Rather than operating as a transactional or attention-driven space, bava.studio functions as a site of encounter, curiosity, and conversation. Blog posts inform installations. Archives become objects. Digital reflections spill into street-facing windows. Events unfold without social media campaigns. The blog becomes less a content stream and more a locus of presence.
Through this experiment, I ask: What might educational technology look like if it were accountable to place? What happens when blogging is uncoupled from platform imperatives and reconnected to embodied community? How might we design digital practices that support local culture, sustained reflection, and meaningful encounter?
At a moment when educational technology prioritizes scale, efficiency, and automation, this session offers a provocation: perhaps blogging’s enduring power lies not in reach, but in rootedness. By reimagining blogging as place-making, we can rethink how digital practices foster connection, identity, and community in the real world.
Participants will leave with conceptual frameworks and practical inspiration for rethinking blogging—and educational technology more broadly—as practices grounded not only in networks, but in neighborhoods."
Our other session in the programme, presented by Maren, is "Winning hearts, minds and budget lines with Open EdTech advocacy".
Inspired by the conference theme “Digital Learning From How to Who” this session will focus on who wins hearts and minds when it comes to Open EdTech advocacy. We will showcase several new Open EdTech case studies (based on interviews conducted with teams of instructional designers over the past 2 years) that show who and how institutions who are at the forefront of Open EdTech adoption develop, scale and deploy open source educational services, including Stanford University, Princeton University and SUNY Oneonta.
At a time when openness in education and on the web is more contested than ever before, these case studies will offer participants practical advice for learning designers and learning technologists, as well as strategic insights for anyone navigating funding and procurement processes for open source technologies.
