Creative Waves - Collaborative Technologies and Applications for Interactive Information Design - page 41

enthusiastic students, teaching staff, professional practitioners and luminaries invited as special guests,
these online creative communities have proved that amazing results can be produced through careful
facilitation between distanced individuals who will most likely never meet. The Creative Waves concept
has to date been offered twice in collaboration with Icograda and the Icograda Education Network.

introduCtion: emerging
online Cultures And
soCiAl ChAnge

Johnson, 2001; Rheingold, 2003; Leadbeater,
2008; Weinberger, 2007).
Blogs and blogging are possibly the most well
known explosion in this area. Blogging has grown
so fast that statistics are continually out of date
(and thus hard to measure), but at in late 2007 the
blog tracking service, Technorati, was tracking
over 72 Million blogs and the 'blogosphere' was
over 100 times bigger than it was just three years
before (Sifry, 2007). YouTube, another famous
online success story, was already serving 100
million videos per day and received over 65,000
video uploads daily back in 2006 (YouTube, 2006).
These successes are not just digital - the Jubilee
Debt campaign started with one person in a shed
in London and gathered enough momentum and
24 million signatures which helped force Western
governments to cancel US$36 billion of debt owed
by Third World countries and developing nations
(Leadbeater & Miller, 2004, p. 54).
There are three emerging and overlapping
areas to examine in the context of the Creative
Waves projects:

Before we examine the role of online communities
and global creative collaboration within the most
recent Creative Waves '07 project, offered by the
Omnium Research Group (Australia) in collabo-
ration with Icograda and its education network
(IEN), it is important to take account of vast social
and cultural changes emerging online over the last
few years.As we will see, the philosophy of online
creativity and collaboration from which Omnium
was borne a decade ago has since become part of
the fabric of many online cultures. Such change
poses great impact in academic settings because
students today are some of the most 'savvy' users
of ever-evolving digital and web-based technolo-
gies. For the current generation these technologies,
that have been the subject of so much academic
research and speculation, are now so everyday
that we need to take account of new ways of
working, socialising and collaborating that have
subsequently emerged. As we have argued else-
where (Bennett, Chan, & Polaine, 2004), we are
beyond asking “should we use these technologies
within education?” and now have much to learn
from a generation that have already been using
them for most of their lifetime.
Quite apart from their use in educational set-
tings, the impact of the kinds of collaborative
processes we will outline below are affecting the
world of professional practice and wider society
in extraordinary ways. The Internet has clearly
changed the nature of communications and com-
munities in the last decade and this has led to
new ways of living and working (Castells, 2000;

• Social networks and communities

• Collaboration, open-source and the rise of

the pro-ams
Organisational change •

social networks and Communities

In recent years the rise of portable or time-shifted
media (such as podcasts, the iTunes Music Store
and the video equivalents), blogs and social
networks have created enormous shifts in tradi-
tional relationships to everything from media, to
education, to consumer and political behaviour.