Conference Agenda

That final stretch of a conference is a particular kind of moment. Your head is full, your notes are overflowing, and the ideas from two days of keynotes, hallway conversations, and serendipitous connections are buzzing. This is precisely the moment to do something with that momentum before it fades. This workshop invites EdTech 2026 delegates to join the Irish Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL) Editorial Team and Guest Editors of the upcoming ILTA EdTech Special Issue for a structured, joyful, collaborative writing session, one where you will leave with a piece of writing in progress and a clearer sense of how to contribute to broader scholarly practitioner conversations.

This workshop aligns directly with the conference theme. The question of who gets to write, publish, and contribute to scholarly conversation is every bit as pressing as who gets to design or deploy technology. Academic publishing has its own access problem: it can feel gatekept, structured in ways that quietly favour those who already know the conventions and see themselves reflected in the literature. The IJTEL Book and Multimedia Review category exists precisely to lower that threshold, and doing that writing together, in community, with an editorial team in the room cheering you on, makes it even more so.

We said the workshop will be joyful, and we mean it. There is a growing body of research demonstrating that joy is not a luxury in the learning process but an essential condition for it (Camfield, 2025). Curtis et al. (2025) found that when learners are given freedom, community, and creative experiences, writing becomes not a high-stakes ordeal but a source of genuine meaning and confidence. Though their research focused on children, the insight transfers compellingly to adult scholars standing at the edge of a publishing landscape that can feel unwelcoming. Joy in learning is fundamentally relational, it emerges from working alongside others and from the satisfaction of producing something real together.

The conference's welcome to newer voices resonates deeply. Early-career researchers, practitioners who identify as writers-in-progress, and colleagues who have never submitted to a peer-reviewed journal before are not afterthoughts. Wallin (2021) argues that collaborative writing creates an "opportunity space" in which participants develop ownership of ideas and cultivate a genuine sense of belonging to a disciplinary community. Drawing on the "Writing Factory" model (Uckelmann & Pfeiffer, 2021) and structured writing sprints (Taylor & Thornton, 2017), the session guides participants through focused, time-boxed activities that reframe writing as an active, social process, one that creates momentum, reduces perfectionism, and produces meaningful peer-learning experiences along the way.

The workshop is structured around a specific IJTEL category - Book and Multimedia Reviews (1,000 words maximum, including abstract and references). If a workshop demo made you want to explore a platform further, or if a corridor conversation introduced you to a podcast, book, or resource that deserves wider attention, this is your invitation to take that encounter seriously and share it with readers. These reviews move beyond simple evaluation to explore how a resource contributes to our collective understanding of technology-enhanced learning, weaving together description, analysis, and reflection.

The 60-minute session will move through three phases. The first (15 minutes) is a structured reflective activity to help participants identify a conference resource worth reviewing, using a freewriting exercise (after Ruppo, 2025) organised around three questions: What surprised you? What do you want to read more about? Whose voice do you want to amplify? The second phase (30 minutes) is the writing sprint itself, where participants work independently or in teams to draft their review using a scaffold, with the editorial team circulating for real-time feedback and encouragement. Those with a different submission type in mind can use this time for dedicated 1:1 conversations with editorial team members. The third phase (15 minutes) closes with a brief share-out, an overview of the submission timeline, and a genuine celebration of the fact that a room full of EdTech practitioners showed up to write together.

This workshop is for everyone: early-career researchers seeking their first publication experience, seasoned scholars wanting a new venue, and practitioners who have never thought of themselves as "writers" but have plenty to say. Writing should be, is, and will be joyful.