I’m between flights right now as I head back to Long Island for a family wedding, while just coming off a wonderful couple of days in Dublin at the ILTA’s 25th EdTech conference. Both Maren Deepwell and Sheila MacNeill do a better job than I ever couple summarizing the keynotes, conference vibe, and all around goodness that the good folks at ILTA provided.I think it is a tall order to top Irish humor, conviviality, and poetic turn of phrase—and this conference had all three in spades. A++++++ Would highly recommend 🙂
But more than anything, it was carrying the torch of an ethos around open education that seems to be flickering in many corners of the web. With the rumours of significant funding cuts in the OER world in favor of a wholesale investment in AI, this conference felt like bastion of hope and resistance. To that end, Professor Felicitas Macgilchrist’s keynote on day 2 was the galvanizing call for resistance through fragility and hope. A literal call for edtechs to rise for their symbolic sewers 🙂
CHUD: Emerging from the basement
I loved it, and not only cause I was giving a talk highlighting edtechs (of a sort) rising from their sewers illustrated by the above screenshot from the C.H.U.D. (1984) poster. In fact, it’s been a while since I presented something that felt truly fresh and I could feel that old energy coming through—it was exhilerating. The lattice of connections that MacGilchrist’s presentation provided in relationship to fragility and shared discontent provided a much needed space for alternatives—an unscripted future that is not pre-determined by the machine.
bava.studio is all about trying to build an alternative to my own discontent with the web, and the good folks at ILTA seemed to relate. Maybe Sting was right, there may just be a hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore. So I’ll send my SOS to the world.
These are the ideas I crave and the energy I need to carry on. I’ll continue to toil away in the symbolic sewers of retro edtech remaining cognizant of that the infrastructures of feeling is the only hope to change the world.
