Overall the quality of sessions were okay - not nearly as impressive as I had expected from the topic of mobile technologies - the exception of course being the presentation by NCSU Libraries' David Woodbury, Markus Wust and Jason Casden - which was awesome! Here are my takeaways from the experience:
1) The mobile trend asks the question: what is/should/could be the interface between the physical or 'real' world and our virtual or online activities and environments (and in our work, Libraries)? QR codes seem to be an important part of trying to address this question. (see 7 Things you should know about QR Codes from Educause: PDF)
2) The notion or idea of "engineering serendipity" from Damon Horowitz of Aardvark (see YouTube video here.) Interesting to think about how this does/n't fit with the work of Libraries.
3) There are different approaches to mobile development, from creating mobile sized web pages from using plug-ins or widgets that convert web pages into mobile versions to building mobile pages using a framework for development. Decisions may be affected by how much IT or programming and development skills staff have, and related to that, the size of the organization.
4) My delicious bookmarks on "mobile" got some new entries.
5) Getting staff together from different departments to web conference together can lead to informative and thoughtful discussions.
All sessions have been archived and should be available for the next 6 months or so for NCSU Libraries staff (see David Woodbury's email this week for the password) : http://www.handheldlibrarian.org/schedule2010/
1 comment:
I liked David Horowitz's talk a good deal. I tried Aardvark and liked the idea of it. I asked a question and got connected to a person who could answer it. He asked me to refine my question, which I did. Then I never heard anything from him again. I like the idea of social search even if my experience proves the utility of machines over flaky humans :)
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