Playpen

A few weeks ago I gave a talk called The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be to the Associate Deans over at Northumbria University. I thought I’d blogged about it with the podcast of the recording I made there, but it seems I forgot.

In the talk I wanted to draw together some emerging and converging trends, which, if they do all happen at once, could really turn higher education on its head. If you mix in some of the other threats such as an aging population and the subsequent fall in student numbers it becomes clear that a radical re-think is necessary.

Rather than double-post, I ll point you to where I posted it over at the Omnium blog where there is a direct download, slides and a embedded player version of it.

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The Omnium Project will be running another global online creative collaboration project under the Creative Waves banner from 28th April - 20 June, this time convened by Ian McArthur and Rick Bennett.

This time the project, called Collabor8, will see design students and lecturers from Australia and China join forces for eight weeks, with project convenors, teachers and special guests worldwide, to work collaboratively and fully online.

The project theme is about creating awareness about the importance of cross cultural design practice and sustainability in design. It will do this by challenging students to work together to design graphics for contemporary, environmentally friendly and sustainable ceramics, textiles, products and environments.

Participation is free and I believe there is space to squeeze in a couple more people, even though the website says the deadline is mid-April. If you are interested, you can apply here.

If it’s any kind of incentive, I’ll be doing a special guest podcast and hosting a thread called “What good is service and interaction design for saving the planet?” in which I’ll take a look about how ‘network thinking’ - something inherent in interaction and service design - is essential to solving some of the complex problems facing us.

Of course, that might be a disincentive for you, in which case just ignore my part and enjoy the rest of the special guests in there.

[tags]Omnium, creative waves, COFA, Australia, China[/tags]

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A few of weeks ago I presented at a Social Learning Masterclass at Northumbria University to an invite from Stephen Farrier from the e-Learning Innovations Enhancement Group.

If you’re interested in having a listen, I posted the podcasts and presentation over at the Omnium blog.

[tags]omnium, presentation, futures[/tags]

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I’ll be in Cuba this weekend (20th and 21st October) to give a presentation at the Icograda World Design Congress with my Omnium colleague, Rick Bennett.

On the crazy off-chance that any of you who read Playpen are going to also be there in Cuba, do come and say hello!

[tags]icograda, cuba, lectures, presentations, omnium[/tags]

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A quick pointer to an interview about the Creative Waves VIP Project with Rick Bennett and I on the very excellent WorldChanging.com.

If you’ve been wondering what it’s all about and why it might be interesting to take part, then have a read.

Thanks to Regine for writing it too.

p.s. If you haven’t bought the WorldChanging book, go and do it right now. It has everything you need to live with a smaller environmental footprint. It’s the stiletto heel of life.

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Last night the new v4.0 Omnium software that runs all of the Omnium projects, such as the Omnium Creative Network and the forthcoming Creative Waves 2007 (as well as all of COFA Online’s courses ) was released as a beta.

It is a massively upgraded version, although much of the effort, as always, has gone into making things simpler not simply adding new things for the sake of it ‘Word-style’. (Of course re-writing and packaging it as open-source took a great deal of time too). There are loads of improvements, including a brilliant admin interface.

It looks beautiful and if you have ever struggled with the likes of Blackboard or WebCT (or even Moodle) then you’ll enjoy this. If you are a creative or research group collaborating in any way (especially involving images and other rich media) and prefer an interface that feels like someone has thought about it rather than a ‘view on a database’, you’ll love it.

Download it now from the Omnium Open site.

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I’ve written before about my work with the Omnium Project and the Omnium Creative Network, but it has been needing another home…

My colleagues from Omnium and I met up in Berlin for a conference and worked out lots of exciting plans for the future, which will steadily unveil.

One big change is that the Omnium Interface has been massively overhauled (with some very cool additions) and will be released as open-source. We hope people will start contributing some cross-funcitonality with other platforms too (like Moodle, which although it has some great management elements and is also open-source, is pig ugly).

So the new home for many of my thoughts and writings about education, is Omnium’s blog that we have finally got up (about three years late). It’s pretty vanilla at the moment, but we hope it will give a bit of a window on the interesting work going on.

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