In September 2011 ten folks disappeared into the Tennessee woods to talk all things mobile at a gathering that became known as Mobilewood. One of the main products of their conversations was the concept of Future Friendly (@future_friendly). A slick slidedeck from Brad Frost (@brad_frost) does a good job of summing up what Future Friendly means. Or, hell, just check it out in the wordsoftheattendees since you can’t beat their first-hand accounts.
Dave Mulder (@muldster) does a good job summing up the output of Mobilewood:
Future Friendly is more the outcome of a Constitutional Convention than it is a practical set of laws. A “when you do stuff, do it with this in mind” mode of thinking.
That mode of thinking gives us flexibility to interpret the core tenets in a broad way and apply them to specific domains. With that in mind I’ve been thinking about how they might be applied to higher education.
The Future Friendly Campus: A Manifesto
What they have to say on the Future Friendly website echoes some ideas that have been floating around in my head for a while. It’s still taken me another month to put those ideas down on paper. What follows is my interpretation of what Future Friendly should mean to higher education and how we can think in our own future-friendly way that builds on the original.
The networked society. The always-with-us mobile device will allow for the always-on, always-connected campus. We need to look beyond silo-ed, one-way mobile sites or native apps towards more personal, two-way applications that take advantage of this change in society. One day a student’s chosen smartphone will serve as their student ID, library card, and method of payment.
Data & content should be set free. Traditional silos of content and data need to come crumbling down. Our data and content will be mashed up in any number of ways and pushed out to our myriad of websites, apps, and new-ish mediums like digital signage. It’s time for departments to start sharing so when can make our data and content as useful as possible to our users.
API First. APIs are the bedrock upon which all of our solutions are going to be built on in the future. Finally, it really is all about strong separation of business logic and presentation. I would love to see schools develop, document, and publicize public APIs for anyone in a campus community to play with.
Services should be accessible and accessible. In a networked society we obviously want to deliver our services to a multitude of devices (not just the latest iOS device) but we also need to deliver those services to our users with disabilities. Everyone should be able to access what we have to offer.
Don’t worry about being known. Worry about being useful. You can’t go wrong by focusing, laser-like on the needs of your users. At the end of the day, if you’re useful to your constituents then being known will take care of itself. A good example of where we often get focused on ”being known” and therefore may not be as “useful” as we can be is the university home page.
Don’t lose sight of the past. Technology is not always the answer. We should never change a process to introduce tech for tech’s sake or to minimize back-end workload if puts access to a resource out of reach for most because of cost. Not everyone can afford the “future” quite yet.
Share your knowledge. The one thing that I’ve been struck by over the last few years in higher education is this… we know our stuff. We can be and are leaders in technology. We’re laying down the best practices that others will follow. If you’re doing something new or different then share! Our community always welcomes new voices with new ideas.
The Future Friendly Campus is about more than just mobile. To take a theme that is so mobile-focused and generalize it is probably bad form. The problem is that mobile is only one set of technologies that we should be thinking about in a future friendly-way in higher education. We shouldn’t lose sight of where else these principles could be applied.
What’s missing from the manifesto? Academics!
What’s the huge hole in this manifesto focused on higher education? There is nothing here specifically about academics. Admittedly, most of the points can be applied to academic systems but I’m probably missing something since my day-to-day job doesn’t involve academics whatsoever. For this manifesto to really be fleshed out I’d love more feedback on how we can think in a Future Friendly Campus-way in the academic realm as well (e.g. mobile learning).
Planting the Seed: This is Just a Starting Point
For some, these ideas may seem totally obvious or even old hat. For others, these suggestions may appear intimidating, unrealistic or unworkable. The key thing to remember is that nothing changes overnight. I strongly believe that higher education does have to embrace a Future Friendly Campus mindset as we move forward. The ways in which our users will want to interact with us, the types of tasks they’ll want to complete, and the types of devices we’ll want to deliver to will just continue to proliferate. Now is the time to reevaluate. In the meantime you can post comments below or take your ideas to an outlet like iMobileU or UWEBD. Let me know what you think.
Graphic Credits The Future Friendly graphic was created by… well, some of the Future Friendly folks. Does this count as attribution for Creative Commons? The seed graphic are two slides that I combined from Brad Frost’s and Jack Bishop’s talk ”Selling the Mobile Web.”
Here are some interesting recent mobile and higher ed happenings that I felt needed highlighting…
Test Drive Kurogo
The team that brought higher education the original MIT Mobile Framework continues to improve their latest open source mobile framework, Kurogo. Early in October they released version 1.3 of their mobile web product as well as the initial release of their integrated iOS app. In the past you could hop over to Modo Labs’ GitHub page, download any of the code and give it a spin but now they have made it even easier to test drive the mobile web version of their product. Head on over to the demo sign-up page and see how you can create your own central mobile portal for your school with content that includes a directory, maps, calendar, and emergency notices. They also have a list of schools that are already using their product.
University of Notre Dame’s Responsive Home Page
Hop on over to the University of Notre Dame’s home page and try out their new responsive design. It’s amazing to see how well the home page scales as the browser window does. Kudos to their team and hopefully other schools can follow suit.
Google’s GoMo Initiative
Google recently launched a new initiative, GoMo, to teach businesses about the importance of the mobile web. A lot of talk has been about the poor technical implementation of their JavaScript-heavy page (I’m loathe to call it HTML5). While I can see that and agree with some other criticisms (the big one being about the vendor list) I do think the initiative’s heart is in the right place. The statistics, quick tips, and GoMoMeter, which shows how your site looks like on a mobile device, are all useful. One thing to note about the GoMoMeter, though, it’s not entirely accurate. It may not run all the JS on your site even though a real device might. But most of the time something is better than nothing.
I was unable to attend HighEdWeb 2011 in Austin, TX this past week. Like a lot of higher ed professionals I’m limited in how many conferences I can go to. The good news, though, is that the conference organizers did a great job providing coverage of the conference via LINK for those of us on the outside looking in. Since I’m sure a few of my readers might not have been unable to attend either I figured I’d list out the mobile-focused talks so you could see what you might have missed, what coverage there might have been and a couple of slidedecks.
What Students Want in Their Mobile Application (APS3)
LINK write-up | Recorded Version (not from HighEdWeb) | Presenters: Glenn Donaldson, James Burgoon and Stephen Fischer of The Ohio State University.
“Technology staff at The Ohio State University has formed an unprecedented partnership with students to deliver a mobile application that meets students’ needs. Three technology workers from different department with very different roles will discuss their process of surveying students to understand their needs, working with them to test the application, and using them for development work. The most important new feature on the recent OSU Mobile launch was the ability for students to look up grades and schedules in real time. We’ll discuss the usage and popularity of these and other features, and plans for future phases. We’ll share the technologies used, some of the challenges on a large campus, and how involving students can make things run more smoothly than one might expect.”
Mobile on a Shoestring (TPR3)
No LINK write-up | Presenters: Quinn Madson of the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and Joel Herron of the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh
“The need to support the ever-growing population of mobile users is critical, yet institutions interested in entering the mobile arena face a multitude of challenges. In the current economic climate, funding for new initiatives is scarce. With IT staff asked to do more with less, many have little time to learn new programming languages and design patterns to support the multiple mobile platforms that exist. Join developers from two University of Wisconsin campuses while they demonstrate a free and open source toolkit used to create cross-platform, native mobile applications. The tool uses familiar web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to generate Java and Objective C source for Android and iOS devices. Using the JavaScript API, developers are able to quickly build applications, as well as take advantage of platform specific features, resulting in best of breed native mobile applications.”
A Mobile Web Framework for the University of California System (APS6)
No LINK write-up | Slidedeck | Presenter: Brett Pollak of UC San Diego
“Most higher ed. institutions don’t just have one IT department. Creating a cohesive mobile presence in this decentralized environment poses a challenge. The University of California system developed and adopted the Mobile Web Framework. This framework allows each UC campus to build and deploy mobile applications that look and feel the same regardless of the technology used to develop them (Java, .NET, PHP, etc.). This has allowed for broad adoption of the framework and an explosion of mobile web applications in the last year across the UC campuses. This session will focus on how the framework is unique from others out there, how the UC campuses are collaborating on its development, and how other institutions can benefit.”
I assume this talk at least partially covered the UCLA Mobile Web Framework. It’s definitely worth checking out anyway.
Feeding the Beast: Fostering an API Culture (TPR6)
LINK write-up | Slidedeck | Presenters: Erik Runyon and Jeremy Friesen of University of Notre Dame
Higher-Ed sites should no longer survive as information silos. To prevent duplication headaches and to ease in data reuse, Notre Dame developers are writing API’s into each application we produce. You need the next 40 days of Student Life events in JSON or XML? We got that. Map data for the Golden Dome in XML, KML or JSON? Not a problem. You can even get your departments page content, news and databases in multiple formats. During this track, we’ll discuss the who, why and how this is done, and give several examples of how these API’s are being used to feed content to a variety of sites and devices at Notre Dame.
On your mark, get set, mobile (TNT8)
LINK write-up | Slidedeck | Presenters: Tiffany Broadbent of William & Mary College and Doug Gapinski of mStoner
There is a lot of buzz about mobile technology and “everything going to mobile.” The mobile market is growing steadily every day; the College of William & Mary’s website saw a 300% increase in mobile traffic over the past year alone. Despite this radical growth, less than 10% of colleges and universities have a mobile website according to a survey conducted by Dave Olsen at WVU. Building on the success of a webinar we co-hosted with mStoner, we’ll use this session to help you take those first steps into the mobile world with confidence. We’ll give you an inside look at how William & Mary’s mobile site was created, how we’re measuring results, and how it has evolved since launch in August 2010. We’ll also cover: – the types of information you should offer in mobile format – the decision to create a mobile app or a mobile website – the choice of purchasing an off-the-shelf product or going open-source – trends and guidelines for styling and coding – examples of mobile content from other colleges and universities
Going Mobile! The How and Why of UVU’s mobile web initiative (TNT9)
Change is in the air – literally! Usage of the web traditionally has been on desktop computers, but mobile device usage is growing exponentially. Some studies predict it will pass traditional web traffic by 2015. Higher education is also seeing rapid growth and the new generation of students arriving at institutions are digitally literate, connected, social, and immediate. Utah Valley University has seen this change occurring and moved forward with a mobile web initiative to better serve students. Come see how they did it, why they did it, the tools used, the questions asked, and decisions made to meet the needs of their mobile users. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM OR ISSUE: Usage of the web traditionally has been in the area of desktop computing devices, browsing for information, services, and functionality. However, recently, more and more of the usage of websites and services is being generated by mobile devices, including handheld devices, cell phones, and mobile computing platforms like the iPad. The mobile device web usage (traffic) is now growing at an exponential rate and many predict it will pass traditional web traffic by as early as 2015. One report states that U.S. mobile web usage grew 110% last year alone. Higher education is also seeing this rapid growth of mobile web traffic. In 2009, 31% of students in grades 9-12 in the United States had smart phones with internet access, and at least 85% of all individuals 15 to 18 years of age had cell phones either with or without Internet access (up from 56% in 2004). The new generation of students arriving at our institutions is digitally literate, connected, social, and immediate. This requires educational institutions and others to become more prolific communicators in these new digital worlds.
A Utility Belt Approach to Mobilized Content (TNT10)
No LINK write-up | Slidedeck | Presenters: Roger Wolf and Doug Beck of the University of Central Florida
Before you embark on your great mobile mission, put the technology aside for a moment and let’s talk about the content. What goes into a strong mobile strategy? We’ll show you how to inventory your available resources and optimize them for mobile delivery. Let’s leverage the best data and content sources and suit up for mobile web, apps and more.
The following is a corporate talk that was presented at HighEdWeb 2011 that relate to mobile:
Geo-Social Nonsense: The Future of Location-Based Services and their Role in Mobile
LINK write-up | Slidedeck | Presenters: Jeff Kirckick of SCVNGR and Krisna Poznik of LaRoche College
*Geo-social applications like Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and others have received a lot of attention over the past year, and higher ed institutions are beginning to adopt them in interesting ways. But are they worth the hype? This session will discuss the sustainability of geo-location apps as they exist today, how they will likely evolve, and why these nascent forms of location-based social media will become the back-bone of what mobile looks like in the future.
*
If you feel your talk was mobile-related and I didn’t list it feel free to drop a line in the comments. More importantly, if you’ve posted your mobile slidedecks let me know!
I’m happy to say that I’ll be giving my “Developing a Progressive Mobile Strategy” talk at the M3 Conference (@m3conf) in Columbus, OH on November 18. I’m going to expand on the talk that I’ve given before and, hopefully, offer a little more insight into discoverability and how it affects solutions that users choose to answer their mobile needs.
The M3 Conference bills itself as:
… a very unique event that sets itself apart from other conferences by focusing on not just one, but all aspects of the mobile development industry. The goal of the conference is to provide education and networking opportunities for the professional community focused around development, design, promotion and the business of the mobile industry.
Their are five tracks so their are lots of options. Topics look to range from higher level talks like mine and the likes of Brad Frost (@brad_frost) (who is presenting on future friendly) to talks that should be focused on development for specific platforms like iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7.
The best part of the conference? The price. It’s currently only $75to register. That’s a great deal if you in higher education and want to learn more about mobile.
If you’re interested in going and haven’t registered yet hit me up. I have two discount codes to give away. I’d love to see a nice representation from higher education from places like Pittsburgh, Columbus, and locations west at the conference.
