EDULEARN25 As it happened

I presented a two hour Practical AI Skills for Educators workshop and then spent two more days at EDULEARN25 learning how other educators create and share parts of their teaching practice with beautiful views of Palma Bay, off the coast of Spain. This was the final conference of my full-time teaching career.

It was good to find dozens of taxis ready to whisk passengers into town or around the island when I arrived after 11PM. My ride was a €10 fare to the hotel. Along the way I discovered the bus would have cost €5 and an Uber would be double the price of a taxi. I used one Uber for the 3.5 km journey from the conference venue to my hotel and that cost me €22. Uber has been in Palma for only two months and the fare structure is unregulated there.

I dove in and out of the conference agenda, enjoying the air conditioning inside while the temperature hovered at 37C outside. I brought several paid AI friends with me (e.g., Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity). I used those AIs to give me greater insights from the slides projected in front of the audience and to compare my notes in 2025 to research materials I've cultivated inside my Personal Knowledge Management System powered by Obsidian (some parts are public).

Day 1. Bernie's AI Workshop

I should have located cough syrup prior to the workshop that I presented in Palma because I carried a scratchy throat and nasal congestion into the event. I had to stop talking five times during my workshop because I was coughing so much.

We started our hands-on workshop at 1630 on Sunday with 12 out of the 20 registered people attending. I used material that Frances O'Donnell and I have delivered several times, including a large set of data developed by Filipe Santos.

I believe the workshop proved that Al doesn’t make you intellectually lazy. Several attendees were amused by my Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. Meta AI jumped up a level after I landed in Palma and that resulted in new sounds running in the glasses. We used Meta.ai to ask "look and tell me" about Ethan Mollick's Co-intelligence and Mairead Pratschke's Generative AI and Education. The glasses just need to see the cover of the books to answer questions accurately.

During my workshop, teams of five people had to analyze a diverse collection of material and then create a Gantt chart. Everyone wanted to get a perfect result so we ran over the 7PM stop time. To get us out of the training room, the conference organisers turned off the fans.

This is the third time that I have used a large block of disparate data in a workshop. Based on audience feedback after all sessions, I plan to integrate a similar task into September's RUNEUAI programme in Portugal.

Day 2. Parallel Sessions

Most of the 775 attendees started EDULEARN25 on Monday but since I was presenting on Sunday, I consider Monday the second day of the event.

I got exceptional value from Punya Mishra's mindful approach to AI. He showed how he uses smart tools for research and how it is critical to argue with AI for second opinions. Rich Braden and Tessa Forshaw brought their lively Innovation-ish journey of creativity to the Interaction Room where myself and Hiram Bollaert went down our own rabbit hole of innovation dynamics. Hiram and I made the break area in front of the Techclass stand one of our watering holes. We appreciate the kind support of Techclass and the Oracle Academy, two main sponsors of the event.

During the coffee breaks and lunch session, I met people with expert views about learning styles, mentoring processes, and personalised learning. I was delighted to meet people like Beck Pitt, David Neumann, and Michelle Neumann and then discover we were just one degree of separation from several mutual acquaintances. I wish the conference organisers could print QR codes for each attendee on the reverse side of their name badges because that would increase the prospect for collaboration. I saw dozens of people snapping photos of lanyards with name tags. Searches with Google Lens grew 65% from last year's conference with more than 100 billion visual searches already this year. The most compelling slide decks that I saw incorporated strong elements of visual identity on key frames.

[For those who know my history with international travel, I'm happy to report that my arrival back into Ireland following EDULEARN25 was without the drama of refusal.]

Day 3. Open, Sustainable, and Ethical

One of the grim realities of EDULEARN is the demise of American attendance. With the dark shadow of Trumpism looming over the education sector, several of the Americans I met were trying to figure out alternative research funding arrangements outside of the United States. Most education research grants have been summarily terminated by MAGA and that means conference travel will require self-funding.

Based on the news that filters into my phone, terms like "sustainability" and "equity of access" could be unwelcome taglines in the current American education system. And with individual American States seeking to regulate artificial intelligence, all meaningful discussions of academic integrity in the realm of virtual tutors will probably happen outside of the United States.

Like all great conferences, conversations and collaborations continue well beyond the final in-person sessions. I made a Flickr album with some of my photos from Palma and I posted several items during the conference on Bluesky. I'm taking several ideas from EDULEARN25 into a new realm that I'm entering outside of classrooms filled with undergraduates. I'll be writing more like I did last century, helped this time by AI making smart connections to several decades of my work stored in my Obsidian Vault. I'll be thinking deeper because of the ideas I've learned during these past three days in Palma de Mallorca. And as I enter a radically abundant age for creativity, I hope to embellish my work by connecting with people who keep the human in the middle of everything we do.