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.

Description / Narrative

Over the past two decades working online, I have moved through higher education technology spaces—both digital and physical—while increasingly asking: What is lost when our digital practices are untethered from material context and place? And conversely, what might blogging become if grounded in the places where people are together?

That question became urgent after the COVID-19 pandemic and my relocation to Northern Italy, far from previous institutional roles and communities. The result was bava.studio—a storefront and physical outpost of a blog. It is not transactional, metric-driven, or designed to “go viral.” Instead, it is an experiment in wonder, conversation, and embodied community engagement.

In this session, I trace the evolution of that experiment—from blog reflections to shop-window dioramas, from unadvertised local events to treating a blog post as a physical object in space. Along the way, I explore the intentional choices behind these practices: what blogging as place asks us to reconsider about the people—the “Who?”—at the center of our edtech community; how uncoupling blogging from platform logic creates room for embodied dialogue and local presence; and what becomes possible when archives, media, artifacts, and conversation are treated as materials of a physical learning environment.

This talk is both reflection and provocation. What would it mean for educational technologies to support blogging that is situated, community-embedded, and place-sensitive rather than optimized for anonymity and virality?

Key Takeaways

Participants will leave with a framework for understanding blogging beyond the screen as a practice of place and public encounter; insights from a real-world initiative blending blogging with physical space and community-making; and questions to guide the reimagining of digital tools in service of real places and relationships.

Why This Matters for EdTech

Educational technology often privileges scale, interaction, and platform efficiency. Yet the material contexts of learning—the spaces where people gather around ideas and culture—are often overlooked. Reframing blogging as place-making expands what digital practice can contribute to learning, community, and identity in the real world.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) increasingly employ learning analytics (LA) - popularly defined as the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners to understand and optimise learning environments. However, while LA promises benefits, its implementation often overlooks the perspectives and concerns of students, who are the primary data subjects. This doctoral research explored undergraduate student perceptions of LA during an educational intervention in which they participated and which focused on developing their critical data literacy (CDL). This qualitative case study highlights concerns from the students involved regarding agency, fairness, transparency, and trust within institutional data practices. Key concerns which arose included the status of students within LA as ‘data subjects’, not data owners or interpreters (Prinsloo, 2022). Students often lack awareness regarding the extent of data collection, its subsequent use, and the potential implications for their educational journey and future opportunities. This passive positioning limits their ability to critically engage with, question, or influence the LA systems that can monitor and potentially shape their learning experiences. LA, therefore, risk operating with insufficient consideration for student autonomy and critical consent, creating limitations related to understanding, control, and perceived equity. This qualitative case study suggests that developing CDL - an awareness and critical understanding of data collection, use, and potential misuse - is crucial for empowering students to navigate these increasingly datafied educational landscapes. This research employed a qualitative case study approach involving 18 undergraduate education students at DCU. Participants engaged in a short course intervention designed to foster CDL. A key component involved providing each student with a personalised report visualizing their own VLE activity data, conceptualised as a ‘reflective tool’ or “an object to think with” (Papert, 1980). This direct engagement with their own LA data was coupled with exploratory seminars discussing datafication, data ownership, agency, and criticality. Data regarding student experiences of the educational intervention and perceptions of LA limitations were gathered through semi-structured interviews and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022). Among the findings were revealed limitations of LA from the student viewpoint, primarily centered around themes of ‘Agency’ and ‘Fairness’. Within ‘Agency’, students expressed feelings associated with being passive ‘consumers’ of data processes and instances of 'digital resignation' - a sense of powerlessness regarding data collection - highlighting a fundamental limitation in student control and autonomy within LA ecosystems. While the intervention fostered increased ‘awareness’ and prompted ‘changes in practice’, these developments stemmed from an initial deficit in agency and understanding. The theme of ‘Fairness’ encapsulated multiple perceived limitations. Students began ‘questioning why’ certain data were collected and how they were used, probing the ethical dimensions of LA practices. A critical limitation identified was the lack of ‘data transparency’, with students expressing a desire for clearer communication regarding institutional data handling. This opacity contributed to feelings of ‘trust and distrust’ towards the institution's use of their data. Furthermore, students emphasised the need for more ‘human-centred’ approaches, suggesting an important role for their lecturer in interpreting LA data around engagement and prediction, as they have a pre-existing relationship with the learner and can provide vital personal context which data alone cannot. This research illuminates critical limitations inherent in non-human-centered LA implementations. From the perspectives of the students, these limitations prominently include a lack of personal agency and control, concerns about fairness and algorithmic bias, lack of data transparency leading to trust issues, and a general feeling of being subjects within opaque systems rather than empowered participants. The findings suggest that for LA to be truly effective and ethical, its design and deployment must move beyond technical optimisation to foster genuine student empowerment and privilege human interpretation of LA.

Learning designers play a pivotal role in supporting technological innovations in higher education institutions, and their work can inform policy and practice on a wide scale. They often act as the last line of defense between EdTech and learners—attempting to model pragmatic applications of EdTech while navigating broader pedagogical, social, technical, political, economic and cultural conditions within the postdigital landscape. However, their positionality in the Irish context is under-researched (Concannon et al., 2021).

Learning designers often exist in liminal spaces between academic and professional services in higher education, which can blur and undermine their status within the institution. This can be further compounded by the “disembodied skills-based constructions of learning designers” in job descriptions (Costello et. al., 2022, p. 460). Research and publication duties are most often related to the research of technology enhanced learning relevant to daily practice, not professional identity. Drawing on extensive experience as a critical EdTech practitioner, I embarked on my research journey as a part-time PhD student with cautious hope to amplify the voice and agency of learning designers, while endeavouring to create a generative model for postdigital learning design.

This paper outlines the journey so far, including lessons learned early in the PhD by publication route. It highlights plans for paper two, which explores the professional identity of learning designers within a corpus of Irish Learning Technology Association EdTech conference abstracts using critical discourse analysis. It is my hope to analyse the positionality of authors, revealing any presence of power imbalances in the literature and provide useful insights into representational gaps. The intention is to analyse what is being said, by whom, and how the rhetoric is shaping current discourse on the professional identity of learning designers. My PhD journey via publication in postdigital learning design has revealed how scholarly writing creates space to expand ideas, test emerging concepts, and develop critical perspectives. The publication journey has proved a vital site for networking and dissemination.

Concannon, F., Farrelly, T., Costello, E., & Welsh, S. (2021). Editorial: Ireland’s online learning call. Irish Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 5(1), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.22554/ijtel.v5i1.93

Costello, E., Welsh, S., Girme, P., Concannon, F., Farrelly, T., & Thompson, C. (2023). Who cares about learning design? Near future superheroes and villains of an educational ethics of care. Learning, Media and Technology, 48(3), 460–475. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2022.2074452

Molloy, K., Costello, E., Brunton, J,. & Thomson, C. (2025). Critical and Creative Methods: From Learning Design Practice to Research. TechTrends, 69(6), 1134–1140. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-025-01154-1