Conference Agenda

Short-form content, in particular emotionally charged “Doomscrolling”, has emerged as a significant challenge to digital wellbeing, particularly among higher education students driven by personalised algorithms and the fear of missing out.

Recent research in digital pedagogy and HCI has noted that self-curated social media feeds, continuous news cycles, and progressive swiping contribute to cognitive overload, stress, anxiety and shorter attention spans, reducing the capacity for deep learning. This negatively impacts students’ productivity and engagement in educational contexts, due to continuous scrolling being intentionally designed to sustain attention through infinite content feeds (Alter, 2017).

Key studies relating to social media’s impact on academic performance highlight student-reported findings on daily screen time and its effects on assignment completion. Platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram have been identified as significant digital distractions that alter the attentional process of students by activating dopamine-based reward circuits and encouraging compulsive checking behaviours (Hormes et al., 2014).

This talk will outline emerging research on scrolling, attention, and digital pedagogy while outlining practical strategies for educators and learning designers to support student wellbeing and sustained cognitive engagement in Edtech learning contexts.

This Gasta presentation will share the collaborative journey of a design team from five higher education institutions as they develop an Open Course, offering participants an opportunity to explore immersive learning and the innovative use of Extended Reality (XR) technologies—Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR)—within education and professional training. The course is designed for learners who wish to understand and select immersive technologies and combines practical skills with critical, research‑informed perspectives on immersive technology in teaching, learning, and assessment.

The design team brings together complementary expertise in technology-enhanced learning, Extended Reality (XR) pedagogy, instructional design, and online facilitation, underpinned by a strong commitment to research-informed practice and open education. The design process was informed by the well-known Carpe Diem curriculum development methodology (Salmon & Wright, 2014) with a commitment from the design team to openness and practice-sharing, leading to the inclusion of immersive technologies within a variety of educational contexts. This presentation will include insights on both the collaborative design process itself and the output, which will be an Open Badge.

Salmon, G., & Wright, P. (2014). Transforming future teaching through ‘Carpe Diem’learning design. Education sciences, 4(1), 52-63.

This talk looks at the Galway-Mayo VLE as part of the REAL analytics project. There are approximately 26 million student interaction events with the VLE annually but what does this mean?

The Gasta provides a high-level overview of how our VLE is being used across our programmes, what level of interaction is typical for a student and what the high-level drivers of interaction and engagement are. We find that there are several different user types but that activity highly concentrated within a small number of courses. 21% of student activity is concentrated in the top 1% of courses and just 8% of courses drive over half of activity on the VLE. What drives this and what features support it?

The aim is to provide a clear, accessible snapshot of our VLE usage and consider how we might best support educators developing their own pedagogy. The Gasta acknowledges the limits of learning analytics and aggregated activity indicators, emphasising responsible interpretation and the importance of pairing data with local context.

The Gasta finishes by considering how a university’s strategic vision for its VLE can impact pedagogy and what educators might need from the University to drive improved pedagogy, student engagement and retention.

In this lightning talk, Dr Maeve O’Dwyer will analyse the concept of ‘third space’ (Whitchurch, 2008; 2012) within the Irish Higher Education context. Staff engaged in teaching and learning and/or research which is non-disciplinary, extra-curricular and/or staff-focused in nature can be identified as third space professionals. But to what extent is ‘third space’ a useful concept in articulating roles and identities for instructional technologists or learning designers? Does it break down silos between ‘academic’ and ‘non-academic’ work, or deepen the divide?

This short talk will cover:

• What is meant by ‘third space’ in Higher Education
• Highlights from existing literature (mostly focused on UK, US, Australia and New Zealand), relevant to instructional technologists and other 'third space' roles
• Preliminary findings from research into Irish HEIs.

Drawing on ongoing research on the impact of third space professionals in the Irish Higher Education context, this short talk will introduce, challenge, and provoke thought as to what extent ‘third space’ can empower us to better articulate our roles and identities at an increasingly challenging time across the Higher Education sector.

Friedman (2025) argues that humanity has entered the Polycene, an epoch defined not by any single crisis but by the sheer unpredictability of simultaneous, accelerating change. If this is the world our students will inhabit, then higher education has a non-negotiable obligation: to design learning experiences that prepare students to adapt, not merely to reproduce what they have been taught.

This provocation makes a deliberately uncomfortable claim: we cannot credibly assert that students understand a concept or practice unless we have evidence that they can apply it in more than one novel context. If we only ever assess learners in the tidy, predictable settings in which they were taught, we are not measuring understanding; we are measuring rehearsal. To assess students' capacity to perform coherently across varying contexts, we must present contexts that demand responsiveness. Varying context is not adding noise; it is creating the conditions under which the signal of adaptive expertise can emerge.

Drawing on Kapur's (2025) Productive Failure research and Juarrero's (2023) account of context-dependent constraints, I argue that uncertainty is not a risk to be managed out of our curricula; it is an architectural constraint to be designed in. In the Polycene, adaptation is the highest measure of intelligence.

This Gasta presentation introduces an emerging project on scholarly podcast creation in Irish higher education. The focus is on academics who design and produce podcasts as part of their teaching, research, and public engagement activities. The Gasta will briefly outline the rationale for treating podcasting as a scholarly practice in its own right, and will sketch initial questions about how episodes are planned, scripted, recorded, and disseminated. In particular, it asks whether there is an identifiable ground-up methodology for scholarly podcast creation in Ireland, or whether current practice is largely ad hoc and individually driven.

The presentation will act as a call for collaboration, inviting colleagues who are already podcasting - or who are interested in beginning - to contribute to a collaborative inquiry into process, pedagogy, and impact. Participants will be invited to share their workflows, tools, and institutional contexts, with a view to co-developing a mapped overview of current practice and, ultimately, a flexible methodological framework for scholarly podcast production that can inform future teaching, research, and recognition of podcasting as academic work.