Hi all,

We're probably like many HEIs that we've been /thinking/ about
developing for mobiles for a long time but not really done much about
it.  To date our only foray into mobile is running WPtouch on our
WordPress MU-powered blogging platform.

One of my colleagues as part of her degree dissertation is also
undertaking some research into mobile/portable use which will hopefully
guide future developments.  Without wishing to prejudice the results
it's likely we'll follow our website structure with two mobile websites,
internal and external.  The external one would be public and provide
access to things like location maps, news, contact details and other
situation-dependent information. The second site would be tied to our
portal and provide a single point of access to mobile versions of
internal systems like email (Google Mail and GroupWise), news,
discussion forums and maybe other services if we can get access to the
data such as library and VLE.

No time scales yet but I'm hoping to schedule in a couple of weeks
where we concentrate on it before Summer.

Regards,

Mike

Head of Web Services
Edge Hill University
http://blogs.edgehill.ac.uk/webservices/
http://twitter.com/MikeNolan 


>>> Alexander Dutton <[log in to unmask]> 12/01/2010 13:22
>>>
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Dear all,

Welcome! It seems that subscriptions are slowing, making this a good
time to express my consternation at just how many people have an
interest in this area. I'll start with some background, but feel free
to
disregard or disagree as necessary!


There seem to be a lot of HE institutions involved in mobile
technologies in one way or another. A fair few have produced
mobile-friendly web portals or iPhone applications. Others are
realising
that users are increasingly using PC-oriented services from a mobile
device, and are seeking to improve access for those on the move.

Our team at Oxford have been making connections with other
institutions
to share information, ideas and code. However, to a certain extent
these
connections have been serendipitous and their results haven't been
able
to be fed back to the larger community.

This list is (initially) intended to be a forum to discuss any and all
aspects of catering for mobile users in a HE setting. A non-exhaustive
list of things you may wish to discuss is:

* mobile computing
* mobile websites
* mobile application development
* increasing and improving access to services from mobile devices
* mobile browser and capabilities detection
* mobile-friendly CSS
* inter-institutional collaboration and code-sharing
* geolocation and mapping

The following aspects of the above topics might also be worth some
discussion:

* design
* implementation
* testing
* best practice
* success (or otherwise) stories

These lists are obviously not prescriptive!


To get things started, I'd like to encourage people to give us a small
description of what mobile-related projects they're working on. I'll
post about what we're up to here shortly, but feel free to post
something in the meantime.

Yours,

Alex


- -- 
Alexander Dutton
Erewhon Project Officer | m.ox.ac.uk developer
Oxford University Computing Services, ℡ 01865 (6)13483
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