I’m very pleased to have been invited by Gilly Salmon to present at the Beyond Distance Learning Futures 2007 conference in January. It will be held at Leicester University, where Gilly is based, on the 9th and 10th of January.

The title of my talk is Converging and Emerging Online Cultures: creative collaboration and a future for learning and essentially looks at the way emerging online cultures are starting to overlap and influence the way we all think, work and communicate. In turn, this has potentially enormous ramifications for education.

You can read the full abstract below:

The socially-networked and community focused online worlds that our students are frequently inhabiting encourage the very qualities that a required for their future careers and lives. Communicating ideas, problem-solving, team-working, creativity and innovation are all hallmarks of this environment. Crucially so is the concept of good citizenship, of contributing in order to benefit oneself as well as the group. The already tired moniker “Web 2.0″ is really a return to what the web does best: connecting people. But what happens once we are all connected?

Drawing upon nearly ten years’ worth of research and experience running global online projects within the Omnium Research Group, we will be examining the convergence of social networks and communities, online creative collaboration, open-source cultures and the rise of the professional amateurs and show how they have radical implications for the future of education and organisational change. This culminates in a vision of global education, sustainability and social awareness that forms the basis of the Omnium Creative Network.