I will be attending the Design for Mobile conference in Chicago between October 20-24, 2010. The conference bills itself as:
Design for Mobile is the first and only North American mobile user experience conference. The focus is on strategy and tactics for user research, product definition, interaction and other design, and usability testing.
While I thought the conference schedule looked great and saw that there were a lot of great speakers presenting at it the thing that really tipped the scales for me was the price. It's only $500 for academic professionals. That price does mean we miss out on preliminary and advanced workshops but I think it'll still be well worth it. Regular price for those three days looks like it'd be $1,800 or so. So definitely a generous deal.
I think the thing I'm most looking forward to learning more about at the conference is user-centered design in the mobile space. I get so caught up in implementing the technical details that I sometimes lose sight of what's really wanted or what will actually work best for the user. Hopefully that knowledge can be transferred to Mobile Web OSP so that other institutions can also benefit.
For folks on Twitter the conference hashtag is #d4m2010 and here are the Twitter handles for some of the speakers (the ones I'm following at least):
If you're going to the conference drop a line in the comments. Maybe we can get a higher ed meet-up together to share notes and best practices.