We’ve been getting lots of activity from our posts on mobile Web.

Mobile Learning:  A Springboard Discussion |  Fear of Mobile Learning |  ML Podcast (iTunes)

It’s something that higher education is already behind in.  The best Web sites have created mobile versions for a group of users growing at an over 100% rate each year.  Look at the big guns:  ESPN, CNN, Yahoo and Google.  Even social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.  There are very few higher education sites with mobile versions.  Try it.  Search for m.harvard.edu.  m.um.edu.  m.berkley.edu.  The best site I can find today is Duke.  Check it out:  m.duke.edu

Traditional Web sites are not going to be cutting the mustard any longer.  The business world moved from HTML to XHTML/CSS, to CMS, and now mobile with custom applications.  Higher education is probably at the XHTML/CSS and/or CMS stage.  Conclusion?  Higher education is behind the curve on this trend.  Unfortunately, the rate that technology grows, we don’t have much time to catch up.

The Experts

Cameron Moll wrote a great book titled, “Mobile Web Design“ that addresses some of the basics.  Brian Fling has also been evangelizing the mobile Web for over five years back when the Motorola Razr was cool.  There are tons of resources from his presentations as well as links from fellow mobile evangelists.  In looking at those sites, the conclusion will be that these developers are not involved in higher education.  True.  They are building for business.  True.  Should I read what they have to say because I work in higher ed?  Yes.  Why?  Because what they are talking about in the business world in real time is happening quicker in higher education than we give credit to.  Case in point:  Do a focus group of ten students on campus.  See what kind of devices they use.  Find out if they have data plans attached to their devices.  You may be surprised at what you find.

The Web is moving at a fantastically quick pace.  We need to keep up.

Migration

Our university has a Jenzabar portal.  We switched from IBM a few years ago.  The portal is fully integrated with our database and systems.  The university has been going through a business process redesign for a number of years to integrate and streamline all services to the portal.  It’s been mildly successful.  Our network and software teams have been working hard to create custom portlets and Web services to serve a number of sub-groups in the institution.  However, one gap in service is the concept of moving the site to mobile devices.

There are a few developers who are building plug-ins and testing for ways to make Jenzabar portals mobile.  But nobody has one working yet that I am aware of.  Wordpress has some developers who have created mobile plugins (Carrington Mobile) and others.  Many sites write a custom CSS file for mobile and print versions.  Higher ed is still catching up with what cutting edge Web developers have known for a few years.  We have to build sites that are standards-compliant with clean validated code.  If higher ed is building these huge monolithic sites, shouldn’t they be accessible to any device?  Not just IE, Firefox, and Safari?  Not just 1024 or 800?

Next Step

I’m going to write next week on higher education’s pattern of innovation (or lack thereof) and how it relates to leadership.  Our PLC had a great discussion on this (which we should have recorded).  I’ll bring some hightlights and ask for your feedback.  But for now, where are your sites?  Do you have mobile versions?  Is there a plan?  Who’s asking the questions?  Post feedback.  Get into the discussion.

Random Resources

• Megan Fisher :: Designing Web Interfaces from Future of Web Design, May 2009  |  Presentation
• Brian Fling :: Mobile Design Blog |  Visit
• W3C ::  Mobile Web Design  |  Download PDF
• Jakob Neilsen :: Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998  |  Visit
• Cameron Moll:  Mobile Web Design  |  Visit

“Web 2.0 Ideas for Educators: A Guide to RSS and More”, by Quentin D’Souza

Summary

While D’Souze’s guide is not technically a research article, it provides an excellent starting point for discussion on the application of Web 2.0 applications to teaching and learning in higher education.

The number of Web 2.0 applications freely available to educators is unknown, but likely numbers in the thousands, if not more. This guide focuses primarily on Web 2.0 tools and services that contributed to the rise of Web 2.0. This includes RSS (Really Simple Syndication), blogs, social bookmarking, wikis, and podcasting. RSS syndication plays the most prominent role in the guide. D’Souze views RSS as the “glue” which connects various Web 2.0 tools, providing automation and efficiency in managing and assessing student work, as well as group projects.

In addition to the suite of applications mentioned above, the author provides brief overviews of additional Web 2.0 applications such as video sharing (e.g. YouTube, Jumpcut, etc.), e-portfolios, RSS aggregators, collaborative documents (e.g. Google Docs, Zohowriter, etc.), collaborative spread sheets (e.g. Google spread sheets, Numsum, etc.), to-do list managers (e.g. 43 Things, Ta-da lists, etc.), online note taking (e.g. Notemesh, Mynoteit, etc.), online presentations (e.g. Gliffy, Mayomi, Google Presentations, etc.), online calendars, and newsgroups. The guide is written from the view of a K-12 educator, but provides plenty of ideas for use of the tools discussed in a higher education setting.

Commentary

Our discussion revolved around the practical and cultural challenges facing higher education faculty who may want to integrate Web 2.0 tools into their courses. Issues that topped the list of challenges included: faculty work load, selecting the appropriate Web 2.0 tool, student privacy, and assessment.
A major obstacle to faculty adoption of any new technology is the associated learning curve as well as the perceived return on investment of their time and effort. Part of the core mission of our department is to help and support faculty in developing proficiency with new tools and offering guidance in the appropriate application of the tool to the teaching and learning process. We generally agree that simpler is better, and would encourage faculty to use only the tools that provide the greatest benefit to student learning outcomes, and that do not require unreasonable effort to manage. It may be beneficial for faculty if we develop a taxonomy of Web 2.0 tools, connecting the tool to categories of learning strategies, or cognitive outcomes (ala Bloom’s).

By law universities are required to protect student privacy, and the use of Web 2.0 tools on the internet will require careful planning and development of “rules” guiding how students refer to themselves, and each other in the online environment. This can be easily accomplished by providing clear, written instructions for online writing and interaction, and employing students, or student groups to monitor and report/enforce communication guidelines. It may be possible to make conformity to communication guidelines part of the overall assessment process for each assignment.

Assessing work performed using Web 2.0 tools may present a challenge when the work performed goes beyond a typical individual writing assignment. For example, creating a wiki, or group assignments using a collaborative tool, or integrating images or video into a creative assignment. Development of a rubric for more complex assignments represents a fair amount of pre-course time and effort by the instructor. If there is one major omission in D’Souze’s guide, it is in the area of assessment. He provides no indication of the types of learning outcomes addressed by each tool, nor and discussion of the implications of assessment work load or methodology.

In spite of this omission, the guide does provide instructors with valuable information on how the tools work, and how individuals can set up each of the tools for personal experimentation.

R. M.

D’Souze, Q. (n.d.). Web 2.0 ideas for educators: A guide to RSS and more. Retrieved October 1, 2008 from http://www.teachinghacks.com/files/100ideasWeb2educators.pdf

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athletics3.6

Originally uploaded by Jason 2.0.
With all the malay of stuff we’ve had to do, I’ve been pretty much out of the loop of what i had hoped to be doing on this project. I’m still a CSS/XHTML beginner and have been kindof relegated to a project manager-type person. I guess we need something like this to hold things together and chart the course, but I was really hoping to have time to get my hands dirtier.

Here are some evolutionary designs for the new athletics site. Joel is designing the main areas, so I’m working on athletics. The funny thing is that I haven’t really designed anything in a few years with more focus being in the video production end as well as IA and User experience. So, I’m needing any feedback from anyone that is reading. Not much feedback here at work. I’ll post some details on each design and hope for some comments. Thebiggest thing that we’re working around is learning a new CMS, so we can’t be too cute with design. I pulled some inspiration from the usual suspects like ESPN, CNNSI, as well as NFL.com’s New England Patriot’s site. That and what the SID brought from local schools and features he requested. Putting that with the current design and timeline, and we have these to work with.

As far as things go here, we’re a month behind and two weeks behind from our week behind timelines. Bottom line: it’s going to be chaotic.

We went through some initial graffles of workflow for targeted constituent groups on campus and will refine those this week.  Our task early is to wireframe the main sections.  I’m headed to InDesign in a few minutes after I do some serious whiteboarding with Joel.  Our bosses are crying out for visual design, and we haven’t even begun it yet.  Feeling like we’re doing diligence with the importan things of content analysis, IA, and messaging/telling the story first.  But today we’re feeling the crunch of getting at least a bare bones design/ideas and wireframes to at least pick apart.

I started reading Bulletproof Friday and will try to devote at least an hour a day to reading and growing in XHTML/CSS, and thinking the right ways about how we need to build this site.  All this and also beginning to play around with Expression Engine.  So I’m really learning…well…I don’t really know how many new things I’m taking in.  But Expression Engine is a tool that I’m thinking about using for a missionary in Africa to manage her content and images.  That and our church is going to EE.  And I have a couple of potential clients that are asking for some sort of CMS.  Of course they aren’t asking specifically for CMS, but wanting all the trappings that go with it.  I’m flirting right now with Expression Engine.  Looked at Plone and some other open-source options, but think that EE could be the way to go if I can invest the time to learn it as well.  Man, I need a mentor to walk me through all of this…

Don’t Make Me Think

Originally uploaded by Jason 2.0.
I just finished this book this afternoon. Wow. I’m a slow reader, so it took me a bit of time to consume this. I brought it with me to Refresh Orlando, so obviously this got put on the fast track. For good reason.

We’ve done usability testing this summer on the current Web site as we attended Jeff Veen’s Usability seminar about two years ago. Joel and I pushed hard and took time to test students the right way. We did focus groups for parents, accelerated degree completion students and graduate students. We published the findings in a comprehensive doc for the VPs and President Beebe. The testing really helped us think strategically about how we would design the new arbor.edu. I’ll publish the doc sometime soon.

What Don’t Make Me Think did was confirm many things we are already putting in process, but also help us really get down to the nitty-gritty on what we’re trying to accomplish. There were tons of things that I could pull out of this, but one key statement was regarding the home page. Krug says:

“As quickly and clearly as possible, the Home page needs to answer the four questions I have in my head when I enter a new site for the first time:

1. What is this?
2. What do they have here?
3. What can I do here?
4. Why should I be here — and not somewhere else?

I need to be able to answer these questions at a glance, correctly and unambiguously with very little effort.”

I believe that’s where we’re headed. He used an exercise that I believe Cameron Moll did in his presentation at Refresh Orlando with squinting at the home page. If you can blur the page and still make out what the basic story is, what it’s about, or where the main sections are, you’ve succeeded. If we value everything and focus on nothing, we’ve lost.

Judging from some preliminary design and IA, I think we’re on the right path. Especially after listening to our audience. I think we’re going to try and do some preliminary usability testing with some of our preliminary PSDs when they are generated to get impressions and feedback. Before we walk down roads too far and too long. Let’s do things right.