Last week Omnium presented another talk at the Apple University Consortium conference in Brisbane, Australia, titled:

The Omnium Project: Global Communities, Ethical Futures and a New Open-Source Solution.

The 90 minute talk, presented by Sam and me (Rick) covered a lot of new material, plans for projects in 2007 and concluded by announcing the new open-source Omnium software for 2007. The audience were very responsive in a highly positive way and the general view from delegates was that for far too long now, IT departments at most universities are actually preventing academics from teaching online in the way they want to and need to - something we identified at Omnium way back in the early days. It is good to see such a wave of protest and I welcome the resentment, because at long last online learning may actually be allowed to make some progress without the restraints of hapless technologies.

This is the abstract of what was presented:

Founded in 1998, Omnium is an ongoing research project based at UNSW investigating online collaboration - especially in educational contexts and between creative participants. Over the last 8 years Omnium has linked thousands of creative folk worldwide through their varied online research projects, accredited fully online university courses and, more recently, a series of online communities set up to work on more socially aware ventures to aid recipients in locations such as Sri Lanka, East Timor, The Philippines and Kenya.

This talk by Omnium’s founder & director, together with their senior technical coordinator, will give an overview of their research over the last eight years, an insight into their award winning teaching and learning strategies, the five-pronged structure of Omnium’s latest research initiatives and detailed insight into their latest socially-aware projects including the global Omnium Creative Network[OCN]

In addition, the talk will unveil for the first time the brand new designs and code for the upcoming release of the 2007 Omnium™ Software for both educational contexts and collaborative commercial ventures. The unique Omnium ™ software, already being rapidly adopted by numerous colleges and universities worldwide, is set to be released as open-source in January 2007.