Background

The 11^th International Social Media for Learning in Higher Education conference took place on 16^th December 2025 at Lancaster University, co-chaired by Dr Katy Jordan and Dr Kathy Chandler.

The theme for the 2025 conference was “Blue skies and green shoots: Thriving in uncertain times”. The social media landscape has seen considerable upheaval in recent years, with familiar spaces becoming subject to shifting social and political dynamics. Our sense of identity and community have been common threads throughout the history of the conference - how has this affected us and our ways of working as learners, educators and scholars in higher education? Where have we found places to take root, and grow, in response to the changing environment?

In addition to hosting presentations on the conference website, the call for papers for this special issue was circulated to attendees and provides an opportunity for conference presenters to submit papers based on their conference participation.

Paper types

The special issue is open to the following paper types:

• Standard paper (4,000-8,000 words).
• Commentary (2,000-4,000 words).

Submitted articles will be double-blind peer-reviewed, and published articles will be distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0).

Submission instructions and provisional timeline

Please submit full papers through the Studies in Technology Enhanced Learning website:

Submit

Full papers are due at the end of March. Once submitted, papers will be sent out to peer review. We aim to return reviews approximately one month later, and revised manuscripts will be due one month after that.

Once major or minor revisions are completed, authors will receive typeset versions for checking.

Publication will continue through 2026, as soon as the typeset version is checked and accepted by the editor-in-chief of the journal.