I presented a large part of what we do at Omnium and also COFA Online taking a look at several projects, particularly Creative Waves 2007, VIP. I finished up with some thoughts about the future of higher education that I have been refining over the past few years.
I recorded the talk (as did Northumbria University if you need a different format than below) and have presented them here in two parts.
The presentation that accompanies the talk is a rather hefty 17MB PDF download (there are lots of images).
You can listen to the sessions in the embedded players after the “Read More…” link, or directly download the MP3 files here: Part 1 (24MB) and Part 2 (20MB).
The Omnium Technical team has just returned from the annual CreateWorld conference at Griffith University, Brisbane QLD. The conference focused on providing academics and their support staff information on a range of research methods and the current state of Digital Arts.
At the conference we saw a range of presentations which covered a nice variety of subjects from Net Art to the idea of a Virtual classroom. Although some of the ideas presented appeared to utilising new technology for technology’s sake, it will be interesting to see how some of the ideas progress. An example was using the much talked about Second Life, which I see to be completely overrated. I have used Active Worlds - which is a similar 3D collaborative virtual environment - in the learning environment and lets just say the experience was less than impressive.
We would like to thank AUC for bringing us this fabulous opportunity to meet with peers and also the people presenting.
The times they are a-changin’. In the next couple of weeks the Omnium team here in Sydney will be undergoing some major shifts in personnel. On the outer:
Sam Bauers will be leaving us to work full-time with Automattic Inc., makers of WordPress blogging software and wordpress.com free blogging service. Sam was our Technical Director and Lead Developer for several years and reared Omnium software from a fledgling e-learning platform to a powerful, open source web application.
Charles Santoso is joining production company Animal Logic as a designer in their art department, no doubt we’ll see some of his amazing creations in the upcoming Happier Feet. Charles is so talented it sometimes scares me, he has been working as our graphic designer, bringing artistic flair to our work.
Paul Jebanasam is leaving our shores for Bristol to follow his dreams in music. No doubt Paul will be ripping out some whacky, phat dubstep beats at the local underground haunts, while dodging muggers with his ninja skills. Paul wrote integral parts of Omnium Software, kept those servers at bay and brought a sense of style to the office.
These three guys will be sorely missed, however they have all met their calling and are moving on to greener pastures.
In light of these departures, Uncle Sam has been on the recruitment trail. Our fresh recruits include:
Paul Rogers is joining us as a new Web Developer, and is now our W-w-windows developer and has already contributed to the Omnium Software
Giorgio Mandolfo has just joined us all the way from Milan, Italy bringing some exotic System administration flavour to Omnium
Just on the way back from the Icograda conference in Cuba - we’ll post a PDF and paper of our presentation soon. There were several questions from the audience about the changing nature of culture and “how can we define it/fit it into our curricula?”. This seems to me to be the wrong way of thinking about things.
You don’t define culture, culture defines itself these days and education, which has previousy been all about defining people and culture (are you from Harvard or MIT? Are you a Designer or a Lawyer..) needs to work out how to adapt.
If you ever saw the great video called The Machine Is Us from the folks at Mediated Cultures, have a look at this new one about information. Try substituting the word culture or education for information:
The new version of Omnium Software has been released. As you may have noticed, the latest version number lacks its usual suffix of characters and numbers. This can only mean one thing: we’re finally out of Beta!
After a grueling year of intense coding and testing, the technical team at Omnium are proud to announce version 4.0.0 of its software.
Coinciding with the release, we have overhauled our website and blog. We thought the website was looking a bit mid-90s, so we decided it was a better time than any for a facelift.
Home
Contact
Subscribe via RSS
