Join us for an exciting day that unpacks the multifaceted intersections of digital technology and education.
This in-person symposium will bring together PhD researchers whose work explores digital technology in education. It will feature international keynote speaker Professor Sigrid Hartong and panellist Dr Ina Sander from Helmut Schmidt University, Germany. The symposium will also include a plenary panel focusing on Impact and Engagement, featuring three speakers with diverse experience in professional, industry or community engagement.
Themes
The symposium will address the following themes:
- Designing: How digital technologies, platforms, and pedagogies are conceived, built, and governed.
- Navigating: How learners and educators use, adapt to, or resist technology in everyday teaching and learning contexts.
- Questioning: Critical, ethical, and theoretical interrogations of technology’s role in education.
Keynote
How to empower learners to become critical co-designers of postdigital society?
Around the world, education policies are increasingly promoting the critical interaction with data technologies as crucial for young people´s active participation in society. At the same time, such policies have, at least so far, mostly focused on issues such as fact checking or awareness for algorithmic bias, neglecting the more foundational problems of tech design, as well as the bigger planetary interdependencies of tech production and usage. Providing insights from different projects, this keynote illustrates how a deliberate critical co-design approach of (education) technology can be utilised to support learners in developing such a broader understanding of data technologies. This equally includes the imagination of future tech design that is more just and sustainable. At the same time, the keynote discusses the significant challenges to establish such an approach, which opposes any form of ‘easy knowledge’, but which also commonly collides with structures of formal education.
Call for papers
PhD students at all stages of their candidature are welcome to participate, either individually or with co-authors.
We especially welcome early-stage researchers who are new to presenting their work, as well as students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds whose research explores teaching and learning in the digital age, including those based outside education departments.
Submission
If you would like to present your research at the symposium, please submit a brief bio (maximum 50 words) and one of two options depending on presentation format.
Presentation formats
Presentations can be in one of two formats:
- Traditional paper – 15-minute research presentations (suitable for PhD students who are mid-late in their candidature). For traditional papers please submit a 200–300-word abstract.
- Flash talks – 3x3x3 format; 3 slides, 3 ideas, 3 minutes to present (suitable for PhD students who are early in their candidature). For a flash talk please submit a 100 word research project overview.
Please submit here.
Submissions close on Monday 12 October 2026.