Some recent happenings in the world of higher education and mobile…
Presentation: Mobile Trends and Opportunities
A few weeks back the Creative Services team (their blog) at the College of William & Mary and mStoner jointly presented a webinar entitled “Mobile Trends and Opportunities.” Unfortunately I was unable to attend. The presentations focus is on higher education but I think most everyone can take something away from it. Some of the questions the presentation tried to answer were:
What can mobile site delivery do for your institution?
Which audiences are most likely to engage with you this way, and how can you meet their needs?
What are the trends in mobile delivery for .edu sites, and how can your institution get started?
Frankly, from checking out the slides I think it was a home run of a presentation. You can download the slides (which is awesome for someone like me who couldn’t attend!) as well as check out the Q&A that occurred after the event.
Michigan State University Launches Beta Mobile Site
The folks at Michigan State University just rolled out a beta mobile website based on Mobile Web OSP. Many thanks to that team for providing feedback on the project including, importantly, tips on accessibility and the WebKit templates.
Opera Mobile 10.1 Emulator Released
Opera has provided a great emulator for testing your mobile sites on their browser. It’s available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
Overview of Mobile Browser Landscape & Some Ideas for Testing
In the same vein Peter-Paul Koch (@ppk) published a good article entitled ”Smartphone Browser Landscape” which gives a good overview of the current issues developers are facing when developing for the mobile web and the myriad browsers and versions.
W3C Finalizes Mobile Web Application Best Practices
For those wanting to stay up on the latest and greatest recommendations as you develop your mobile experiences be sure to check out the Mobile Web Application Best Practices from the W3C that was just finalized.
Special note: if you see the “download demo” link on the requirements page be aware that it’s not the demo for v2.2.7 but an entirely new version of the framework.
iMobileU Announced
As part of the effort to support their project, MIT and Modo Labs (a spin-off of the folks who created the original framework and who have worked on Harvards mobile site) have announced iMobileU. It’s actually been around for a while simply as a listserv and a bi-weekly conference call but they now have a web presence. It’s mainly focused on supporting schools using the MIT Mobile Framework but they’re definitely open to questions regarding general issues in mobile and higher ed.
So with Mobile Web OSP now (roughly) one year old I figured it’d be a good time to review the project. For those who are new to this blog, Mobile Web OSP is a PHP-based framework that I maintain. It is designed to make it easier for universities and colleges to deliver mobile portals. It has been open sourced under the MIT license. The code for my project is a fork of v0.9 of MIT’s original MIT Mobile Web product. I covered why I created the fork in an earlier post. I’ve also have a ”year in review” post so you can see our mobile traffic and another post showing a good case study for mobile in higher ed.
Overview
The project has been a greater success than I could have imagined. Twelve schools (that I know of) have launched mobile portals based on version 1 and version 2 of the project. Developers from Colorado College and Miami University have provided great notes on bugs. Southeast Missouri State University even contributed a module for others to use. The project has 35 people following it on GitHub along with some forks and I’ve given two webinars on the project for Higher Ed Experts (you can still grab the on-demand version of the webinar). So overall not a bad run for the first year of the project but now it’s time to look forward to the upcoming year…
The Next Release: v2.5
I’m actively working on the next release which I’m currently marking as Mobile Web OSP v2.5. I go into more depth on each of these issues further down in the post but this release will have:
Proper multiple database support including MySQL using MDB2
“Where am I?” and “What’s near me?” features for the Campus Map on advanced WebKit devices
The weather module up-to-date with v2.x templating
An easier installation process
If you want to follow along on how this release is going just check out GitHub.
MDB2 & MySQL Support
When I started my fork of the project I didn’t have many options when it came to choosing a database and, most importantly, those options didn’t include MySQL. In order to keep things simple and to get the project moving as fast as I possibly could I chose to use SQLite. At the time it made a lot of sense. The feedback that I’ve gotten from other schools since then, though, is that they would prefer to use a more traditional RDBMS a la MySQL or PostgreSQL. A number of schools have even hacked in this support (or fixed my broken implementation depending on your point of view). In order to make the project more attractive to schools I’ve decided to add in MySQL support by adding support for MDB2. Hopefully this means that the project will not only support MySQL but schools will also be able to use PostgreSQL or MSSQL. If you want to keep track of this effort check out the MDB2 branch of the project. Hopefully it’s rolled back into the master branch pretty quickly.
Location, Location, Location
One feature that I’m having to add for our use (and one of the main reasons I’m adding proper MySQL support now) is a way for users to show where they’re at on the campus map as well as query what’s nearby. Creating a robust campus map module that includes those features as well as easily links to other data (e.g. looking at a dining hall will give you a link to the dining menu) is one of my main near-term goals with the project. I also hope to sync some data from foursquare with the campus map as well.
Ease of Installation
I’m not sure how much of a problem this is for others but as I work on the project this has become a major headache. All the data.copy.inc.php files are great for configuration but a pain to set-up each time. If you check out the master branch of the project you’ll notice that there is now a setup.php file in the root. While it still needs some final testing installation in the future should be as simple as running that script and answering a couple of easy questions. That’s the hope at least
So what are the other issues out there that I’m thinking about with Mobile Web OSP?
Collaboration
I’m open to collaboration. Serious. If you have suggestions, bug fixes, or new modules please let me know and we’ll find a way to work together. Probably the easiest way to collaborate is to fork the project on GitHub, makes your changes and request that your changes be merged back into the parent project.
I really don’t want or need this to be a one man show.
Device Detection & Classification
The original MIT mobile framework used WURFL to detect and classify devices. At the time I created my fork it just didn’t seem practical to continue to use that method when 1) classification seemed to consist of iOS devices vs everything else and 2) the WURFL code was GPLed and I wanted to release the code under the MIT license. As Android has gained in popularity and BlackBerry has released better/bigger devices it’s getting difficult to keep up with properly classifying devices. I also don’t have a set of hardware to properly test features. At the moment I’m a little unsure of what solution I’ll pursue. In my road map I talk about looking at support for Device Atlas… but really I’m not sure. If folks have feedback on where the project should go in this department please feel free to drop a line in the comments.
JavaScript Mobile Framework Support
One of the big features for version 2 of the project was the addition of jQTouch support for advanced WebKit devices. This is another “it made sense at the time”-features. Unfortunately time has moved on as well as the lead developer for that project. While jQuery Mobile isn’t fully baked yet I would expect that Mobile Web OSP will move to it once it goes gold. Why not Sencha Touch? The implementation of Sencha Touch would require another deep guts architectural change and that makes me queasy. jQuery Mobile is implemented in much the same way as jQTouch so hopefully it won’t be such a big change (fingers crossed & knock on wood).
Conclusion
I’m sure I’ve left a lot of questions regarding the state of the project unanswered. This post was based on the pressing issues that I’ve been working to address as well as the few questions I received based on an earlier post. If you have any other questions please submit a comment so I can answer. Maybe others have the same question.
Updates
Since I originally published this article I have posted a few more articles regarding work that I’ve been doing to implement some of the changes I talked about above. These articles are:
California Lutheran University recently launched their mobile website built with version 2 of Mobile Web OSP. They did a great job modifying the look and functionality of the system to make it there own. One thing I’m really impressed by is their introductory video to show folks how the mobile website can be useful to them on campus. The best part might be the ending. Check it out below:
It’s such a great way to show off campus mobile services.
This project & this related post were updated on May 24, 2011. I’ve updated the “requirements,” “what you’ll get,” and “how to use it” sections of this post.
As we roll out WVU’s official presence on foursquare I was curious how we could track general usage statistics. foursquare provides a nice dashboard on a per venue basis but I wanted a quick & dirty way of finding out total numbers across all of the venues we have added (105 of them!). I spent a few hours putting together a foursquare statistics report generator. I’ve made it available on GitHub since I figured other schools might be interested in learning general usage numbers as well.
Requirements
The requirements for using the package are:
PHP (like most everything quick & dirty that I develop)
A list of all the venue IDs saved as venues.txt. An example is included in the release. This will require legwork but if you’re not already a part of the official foursquare set-up you’ll need this list if you want to be.
A client ID and client secret from foursquare’s OAuth service.
What You’ll Get
The package will generate a text file (check out the example) with the following information:
Total venues
Total check-ins
Total venues without a check-in
Total tips
Total photos
How many different mayors there are
Top five venues by check-in
Top five venues by tip
Top five venues by photo
All venues sorted by venue name with their number of check-ins, number of tips, and number of photos
All venues sorted by total check-ins with their number of check-ins, number of tips, and number of photos
Caveats
Always some caveats:
If you have more than 200 venues that you’re tracking this script will not give you details past number 200. This is because foursquare rate limits unauthenticated API calls to 200 calls per hour per IP.Note: I don’t believe this is the case any longer with version 2 of the API but I’ll leave it here just in case.
This should only give you numbers for your official venues. Anyone who creates some special check-in that’s basically for them (e.g. an office) I suggest you skip tracking. But, hey, some numbers are better than no numbers, right?
Register a new consumer (click the big, green button). You do not need to supply a valid URL or callback URL.
Enter in the generated client ID & client secret in the authentication credentials section of statistics.php.
Create your own version of the venues.txt file and, again, you can use the example there. This is annoying and time-consuming.
Run the script from the command line by navigating to the appropriate directory & typing: php statistics.php
Check out the reports directory for the report you just generated.
Command Line?!
It’s easier than you think. If you’re on Mac OS X this should help you. Let’s assume you’ve saved the Foursquare-Statistics directory that you downloaded from GitHub on your Desktop and you’ve added your venues. Then do the following:
In the Finder go into the Applications folder and then the Utilities folder.
Double-click Terminal
A text window should have opened up with a blinking cursor.
Type: cd Desktop/Foursquare-Statistics
Hit return
Assuming no error just type: php statistics.php
Your report should have been generated.
Hopefully it’s pretty simple and you find the information useful.