Playpen

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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My colleagues and I from The Omnium Project will be conducting a workshop at the Online Educa 2006 Conference in Berlin on the 29th November and it will be introduced by the renowned E-learning specialist, Professor Gilly Salmon. We would love to see you there and make contact.

Our workshop is called Small World - Global Classrooms: Exploring the Potential and Advantages of Fully Online Global Learning Communities and essentially details the projects and research that we have been involved in over the last seven years or so as well as looking into the future. It’s divided into four parts:

Part One: Research:
Enabling Collaborative and Creative Education Through Fully Online Global Learning Communities

Part Two: Teaching and Learning: Preparing and Teaching in a Fully Online and Communal Context

Part Three: Postgraduate Supervision: Hosting Local and Global Online Communities to Enhance the Postgraduate Experience

Part Four: Life-Long Learning: Education Meets Professional Practice via Fully Online Global Communities

Part Four is the section that I am presenting at examines at the rapidly changing nature of professional (and pro-am) life, the rise of social networks and online communities, etc. and how these affect education enormously.

For example, what are the educational expectations of a 18 year-old who has instant messaging friends all over the world, has their own MySpace page and blog and for whom Google and Wikipedia are the first authorities on anything in the world? The Academe has long tried to educate students about the values of refereed publications and reputable sources, but perhaps it is academia that is out of date. What is more influential in reality - an obscure journal with a expert readership in the hundreds, or Google with a user-base of millions?

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Google and the United Nations Environmental Programme last week launched an addition to Google Earth called the Atlas of Our Changing Environment, which allows people to view images of environmental change and information overlaid onto the satellite images.

You can access them from the ‘Featured Content’ section of Google Earth, or you can look at the web version.

I find this convergence of interaction/information design and environmental/sustainability issues really interesting because a large part of the problem is making this stuff meaningful and visible to everyday people and hooks into the work we’re trying to do at the Omnium Creative Network. It goes to show that good visual design (and of course the data) can really have an impact.

I’ve known about the scale of deforestation in the Amazon for years, all the stats on football pitch sized patches being destroyed every hour, etc. But it’s not until you see an image like this (and you can get the 1970’s image overlaid too, to compare) that you really appreciate how awful it is. Most of these images from Rondônia are from about 500 miles up too. From the overlay info:

In 1975, the region was still relatively pristine, with much of the forest intact. By 1989, the distinctive fishbone pattern of forest exploitation had appeared and by 2001 had expanded dramatically.

Shocking. As are almost all of the before and after images.

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