EdTech 2025

Welcome to EdTech 2025!

EdTech 2025, the annual conference of the Irish Learning Technology Association (ILTA), is hosted this year by South East Technological University (SETU) in Waterford. This event brings together educators, researchers, technology and student support staff, and industry professionals to share and explore the effective use of technology in education. This event provides an opportunity to present your research and projects, expand your professional network, and develop new collaborations. The conference will take place over two days: Thursday, May 29th and Friday, May 30th, 2025.

EdTech 2025 aims to highlight work in digital education from the ILTA community, SETU, partner universities, and the wider education community. This conference is dedicated to exploring and advancing teaching practices in the digital age. It serves as a platform for educators, researchers, and experts to share insights and contribute to the future of digital education. Through various sessions, workshops, and keynote presentations, we seek to provide a clear understanding of the challenges and opportunities in digital education. We look forward to productive discussions and collaborations during the event.

Registration

We are thrilled to announce the EdTech 2025 Conference, to be held on 29-30 May 2025, in Waterford.

Key conference details:

What: EdTech Conference 2025
Where: The South East Technological University, Waterford
When: Thurs May 29th – Fri 30th 2025
Why: Be a part of the convivial conversion of a key professional network

Conference theme

Dear ILTA colleagues and friends,

We welcome you to join us for the Irish Learning Technology Association’s upcoming annual conference in May of this year. This two day event held this year in the South East Technological University (SETU) in Waterford id designed for educators to develop and share their practice and research, provide constructive feedback, and build networks and partnerships for future collaboration.

This year, the conference will examine how we continue to adapt and critically engage with educational technology, in a changing landscape. The deeper context and our wider purpose is to ask:

"Are we there" there yet?"

The hereness and not-yetness of AI and educational technology

AI is not going away but although it is well and truly here we may still ask: “Are we there yet?”

The Irish learning technology sector has certainly responded via for example N-TUTORR and SATLE funded initiatives; AI literacy courses and programmes; guidelines from the National Forum for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education; the National Academic Integrity Network and The AI Advisory Council; and a wide array of policies and responses to the challenges posed have been developed (and redeveloped) by educational institutions big and small.

In seeking to explain this phenomenon, GenAI has been posited as a type of “arrival” rather than “adoption” technology, one that we must adapt to rather than consciously adopt or integrate (Klopfer et al, 2024). But although this framing might describe how quickly it appeared, (everywhere all at once), it does not fully account for the differentiated, context-specific, intentional and agentic responses that educators have offered.

“Are we there yet?” could also be translated as: is this as good as it gets? We may ask if have we reached a waypoint at which to assess and appraise maturity in the GenAI cycle and those of other emerging technologies and ideas such as microcredentials, AR/VR/MR etc.

And are our values as good as they get? If so, will we defend, treasure and sustain particular educational goods such as diversity, equity and inclusion?

For this and much, much more we warmly invite learning technologists, practitioners, teachers, researchers, students, leaders and learners to come together to embrace the messiness of these questions and share in the not-yetness of our responses (Collier & Ross, 2017) at the Irish Learning Technology Association’s annual and epic EdTech conference.

We invite contributions on topics including but not limited to the below:

Gen AI
LLMs for education
The AI opportunity cost
AI response types
Accessibility and UDL
Innovative and creative practices in teaching and learning
Classroom technologies
Online learning
Learning analytics
Students as partners in assessment design
Micro-credentials
Sustainability and digital learning
Audio-visual and creative media for teaching and learning
VR/AR and XR
Learning design models, practices, and applications
Theories and conceptual frames of learning and technology
Open education, OERs and open science
Democratic classrooms
Student communication in and beyond the discussion forum
EdTech procurement

Under the auspices of our 2025 host SETU, The South East Technological University, you are invited to Ireland’s oldest city of Waterford to hear a fantastic range of talks, including from keynote speaker Professor Jen Ross of Edinburgh University, and Professor Ale Armellini of the University of Portsmouth.

We look forward to seeing you and please consider submitting a proposal from March 12th.

References:

Collier, A., & Ross, J. (2017). For whom, and for what? Not-yetness and thinking beyond open content. Open Praxis, 9(1), 7-16. http://doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.9.1.406

Klopfer, E., Reich, J., Abelson, H., & Breazeal, C. (2024). Generative AI and K-12 education: An MIT perspective.