Liveness at ASCILITE 2025

Reflections for future-focused actions

Abstract

This poster explores the concept of liveness (Chhaya, 2015; Lee, 2021; van Es, 2017) within the conference theme Your Journey: here, the journey is the path of engagement, reflection and new knowledge for attendees at ASCILITE 2025. For TEL practitioners and researchers, liveness at the conference involves working with context (of the presenters' institutions, of the history of theories and technologies) as we enter the twists and turns of a project timeline, engaging with the presenter as a fellow traveler accompanied by their tech companions. Beyond the conference, liveness can inform practitioners’ designs, interactions, and evaluations of their tech-enabled educational work.

Taking a socio-material perspective (Fenwick et al., 2011) allows the authors to examine content as well as networks, spaces, technologies, interactions, and affect (Lupinacci, 2019) generated through participation at ASCILITE. The authors will engage in collaborative autoethnography (Chang et al., 2012) as the method for interrogating the learning journey of attending this conference and future conferences. 

Departing from traditional poster presentations, this evolving document enables attendees to add to the space available in the poster for near-real-time content generated from the conference experience. We invite participants to engage with the authors and the poster itself by contributing via social media and on Padlet using the provided QR codes to share their reflections on this conference and the ASCILITE journey.

We aim to encourage a timely immediate engagement with authors of new knowledge, as characterised in constructivist and experiential learning environments. Utilising poetic inquiry and reflexive praxis as diverse examples of tertiary practice (Table 1, S5), the authors will create an emergent poster by mining social media around online engagement at the conference and by using bricolage (Honeychurch, 2023) to add to relevant areas of the poster (Table 1, based on the Activity-Centred Analysis and Design (ACAD) framework (Goodyear et al., 2021) for learning designs: epistemic (“liveness”), social (“community”) and set (“technologies and tools”). This approach utilises TEL practice for a timely and effective surfacing of attendee reflections (Gibbs, 1988) and conference evaluation.  

It challenges the notion of the conference as merely a collection of "what was", instead, positioning it as a space to look forward to and encourage creativity, connectivity and learning (Bryant, 2024; Casey et al., 2024). The completed poster will provide a novel evaluation of the conference experience (Chapman et al., 2007) by integrating reflection directly within the conference and prompting the community to put their learning into practice.