I’m between flights right now as I head back to Long Island for a family wedding after a wonderful couple of days in Dublin at ILTA’s 25th EdTech conference. Both Maren Deepwell and Sheila MacNeill do a far better job than I ever could summarizing the keynotes, guests, conference vibe, and all-around goodness that the folks at ILTA provided. It’s a tall order to top Irish humor, conviviality, and a poetic turn of phrase—and this conference had all three in spades. A++++++ would highly recommend 🙂
But more than anything, it was about carrying the torch of an ethos around open education that seems to be flickering in many corners of the web. With rumors of significant funding cuts in the OER world in favor of wholesale investment in AI, this conference felt like a bastion of hope and resistance. To that end, Professor Felicitas Macgilchrist’s keynote on day two was a galvanizing call for resistance through fragility and hope. A literal call for edtechs to rise from their symbolic sewers.
CHUD: Emerging from the basement
I loved it, and not only because I was giving a talk highlighting edtechs (of a sort) rising from their sewers, illustrated by the screenshot above 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 exhilarating.
The lattice of connections Macgilchrist’s presentation provided around fragility and shared discontent created a much-needed space for alternatives—an unscripted future that is not predetermined 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 that infrastructures of feeling may be our only hope for changing the world.
