EDUCAUSE is running an interesting experiment — they’re holding a 5-day online event called the Mobile Computing 5-day Sprint.  It’s a collection of five days worth of webinars, including polls, interactive discussions and other features.  The live sessions are booked, but they promise to post recordings each day.

I’m especially interested in tomorrow’s theme: Teaching and Learning.

The full list of themes for each day, and details on the sprint format, are available.

In a recent article in Library and Information Research, Andrew Walsh discusses the results of a study that explored the attitudes students have toward mobile services in the academic library.

A few things that I found interesting were that students felt that getting texts from the library would be welcome if the information was useful. They’d also be okay with being automatically subscribed as long as it was easy to opt-out; they didn’t want to miss out on a useful tool.  They don’t really want to experiment with new things unless it’s clear how it will be useful to them as individuals.  Utility is clearly a theme.

From the conclusion:

The results suggest that libraries considering increasing their services aimed at mobile users should:
a) Initially introduce services that use text messaging, not the mobile web.
b) Concentrate on services that potential users can immediately see benefits for, such as “reminders” of overdue books, rather than services with less obvious, or less mainstream benefits.
c) Make sure that any mobile friendly services are marketed carefully, selecting the groups most likely to benefit from them and directly stressing those benefits to the potential users in any promotional activities.

Some of the things mentioned in the study that might be worth exploring, at least as a pilot:

Text reminders for overdue/renewals
Text reminders for work shifts
Text when a book comes in
Texts for room booking reminders

The study was conducted at the University of Huddersfield in the UK in 2009.

Citation:

Walsh, A. (2010), “Mobile phone services and UK Higher Education students, what do they want from the library?” Library and Information Research. Vol.34, No.106, pp.22-36.

[PDF here]

MasterCard is planning to release an API in coming months, allowing certified developers to create applications that interact with MasterCard.  PayPal is already paired up with Bump Technologies and  allowing people to make payments to one another by bumping their iPhones together, and Visa with Visa payWave to just pass their card in front of a sensor to make payments.

Could this help libraries?  We could make it easier for patrons to pay fines, or even make donations?

April 5×5 : April 13, 2010 (new date!) April 6, 2010 : 10 am : Hahnemann Library Conference Room

At our next 5×5 presentation, we’ll have 5 of our colleagues reporting on one interesting or useful aspect of a meeting or conference they’ve recently attended.  Here’s the lineup:

Jay Bhatt will talk about a recent Begell Digital Library Advisory Board meeting he attended. [Jay Bhatt Slides]

Kate Lynch will provide a highlight of of her experience at Code4Lib. [Kate Lynch Slides]

Gina Cacace will highlight ideas discussed at the NFAIS 2010 meeting. [Gina Cacace Slides]

Rob Sieczkiewicz will talk about the CLIR Sponsors Symposium. [Rob Sieczkiewicz Slides]

Meg Finney will discuss sessions she attended at the eLearning 2.0 Conference. [Meg Finney Slides]

Jess and I are pleased to announce the arrival of Spark! Plus!  These are one-time events that will fall outside the regularly scheduled Spark series.

The Libraries have signed up for The Handheld Librarian Conference 2010.  The Handheld Librarian is an online conference that covers issues related to reaching users via mobile platforms.

The conference will be shown in L33 on February 17 & 18, 2010.  The full list of speakers is here, and you can drop in for any/all of the presentations.  There are 4 one-hour keynote addresses and several elective sessions.

I’ll be emailing an attendance interest form, so take a minute to fill it out!

The New Media Consortium’s 2010 Horizon Report features six technologies with a timeline for likely entrance into the mainstream for “teaching, learning or creative inquiry”.  Each technology is accompanied by an overview, potential relevance for teaching, learning or creative inquiry, and examples of these technologies in use.

The web version of the full report is here.

In the next 12 months:

Mobile Computing and Open Content

In the next 2-3 years:

Electronic Books and Simple Augmented Reality

In 4-5 years:

Gesture-Based Computing and Visual Data Analysis

Yesterday I attended an EDUCAUSE webinar called “Library in your Pocket: Strategies and Techniques for Developing Successful Mobile Services.”  Presented by the NCSU Libraries, it focused on services to patrons on mobile devices.

They have a few programmers who contributed time, and there was some discussion of the process they used to make a decision on which services they wanted to make available right away, and which of those can wait, or not b included at all.

The archive is available here.