Using Virtual Focus Groups in Distance Learning & Online Environments
Monday, 6/27 from 1:30-3:30
Morial Convention Center, Rm 333
ALA Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA

We have a great panel lined up, all of whom have practical experience running virtual focus groups. And that’s including (if conference center wi-fi permits) one presenting remotely – we’ll try and practice what we preach

Depending on how bold I feel on the day of, I may try to ustream the whole panel via my phone. I’ll be sure and post the link on this site if we do.

Here’s the program in the conference scheduler:
http://connect.ala.org/node/137552

More details are after the cut. Note that the last 15 minutes are reserved for the brief annual DLIG meeting. Hope to see you there!

Gathering information about the library needs of students who are taking courses online or off-campus can be challenging. This program will focus on the use of virtual focus groups to gather student and faculty reactions to existing and future library services and gain a better sense of how these students research and what they find challenging.

The program will feature three librarians who will describe virtual focus group projects that they conducted at their own libraries. These projects, targeted at online and distance students and faculty members, were used to determine awareness of library resources, service needs of distance populations and to inform web site redesign. Panelists will discuss recruitment of participants, technology used for conducting the focus groups, challenges they faced and evaluation post-focus group. A fourth panelist, Dr. Janet Salmons, author of Online Interviews in Real Time (Sage 2010), will participate remotely, and will demonstrate and discuss the use of visual features of online meeting space such as shared whiteboard for interactive focus groups.

This session will provide an opportunity for librarians who work with distance, online and face-to-face students and faculty to connect with one another and share experiences with assessment methods. We’ll have plenty of time for Q&A and audience interaction. The panel session will be followed by a brief DLIG business meeting.

Panelists Include:
Stefanie Buck, Ecampus and Instructional Design Librarian, Oregon State University.
Barbara Mann, Assistant Director for Public Services for Information and Library Services, University of Maryland University College Library.
Janet Salmons Ph.D., Graduate Faculty member, Capella University School of Business and Technology and scholar-practitioner and consultant through her company, Vision2Lead, Inc.
Diane Wahl, Librarian for Planning and Assessment, UNT Libraries, Denton, Texas.

Moderated by LITA-DLIG Co-chairs:
Chad Haefele, Emerging Technologies Librarian and Computer Science Subject Specialist, University of North Carolina, Davis Librarychad.haefele@gmail.com
Lauren Ray, Research Commons and Educational Outreach Services Librarian, University of Washington Libraries, Seattle, WA,olray@uw.edu

Thanks, and hope to see you there! The last 15 minutes of the program are reserved for the brief annual DLIG meeting.

My slides are embedded here, and the original powerpoint file is available at http://bit.ly/LILRCmobile

(note that the animations don’t work on Slideshare)

First, I’m presenting on ALCTS’ Mobile Catalog Interfaces panel:
Saturday 6/26/10 10:30 am-12:00 noon
HILTON WASHINGTON, Columbia 5

I’ll be going over our mobile catalog interface, a bit about the design process, pointing out some new features, and hoping for great questions.

Second, I’m co-chair of LITA’s Distance Learning Interest Group. We’re co-sponsoring a program with ACRL’s Distance Learning Section:
Open Access: A Conversation
Saturday, 6/26/10 1:30 to 3:30 pm
Washington Convention Center
Room WCC-144A-C

Third, for the DLIG annual meeting we’re trying something a little different. Instead of having a giant room reserved for a standard roundtable discussion for a block of time, we’ve reserved some space in the Networking Uncommons: http://annual.ala.org/2010/index.php?title=Networking_Uncommons
Networking Uncommons space
Sunday, 6/27 9:30-10AM

The Uncommons is a space on level 1, concourse A, near the exhibits. There’s tables, a projector, and plenty of power strips. We have no specific agenda. Just show up, hang out, and mingle! It’ll be morning, so feel free to view it as a warmup for the day – bring coffee and ideas. We have the 9:30-10AM Uncommons slot on Sunday the 27th.

Hope to see you there! If anyone wants to meet up during the conference, the best way to get ahold of me is a message on twitter. I’ll be around from Friday – Sunday, leaving Monday morning and trying not to melt.

Today’s slides, on slideshare:

(A couple of images got scrambled in the process of uploading to SlideShare, but all the content is intact)

First, while there’s many other available frameworks than just the two I talk about, I do want to specifically point out the MIT Mobile Web project. The folks over at NCSU have done a great job implementing it with their library’s mobile site. They’re talking about it in a session right after mine, so I won’t be covering it in too much detail. MIT’s code is fairly robust, but also much more complex to get set up and running than iUI or Jason Clark’s work.

Second, some interesting stats. From two separate reports, both with data about December 2009. Looking at them side by side:

-Apple has 25.9% of the US smartphone market share (in devices sold), but iPhones also make up 54% of US mobile web traffic.

-Android has just 5.2% of the US smartphone market share (in devices sold), but makes up 27% of US mobile web traffic.

-Blackberries have an astonishing 41.6% of the US smartphone market share (in devices sold), but make up just 10% of US mobile web traffic.

There’s an important lesson here to keep in mind when choosing which devices to support with a mobile website. At first glance, looking at Blackberries’ market share alone, they seem to be the platform to support – it’ll get the most users in, right? Not when they use just 10% of all mobile web traffic! The heaviest users, the people we should be targeting now with our services, are on Android and iPhone. By supporting their combined 31.1% market share of devices with our our mobile sites, we’re available for 81% of mobile web traffic. That’s a pretty solid return on investment. I’m not surprised by these results, but it’s always nice to have numbers to back up intuition.

This isn’t to say that blackberries should be ignored – they’re just not the best target audience for a pilot program.

My other favorite thing about iUI is that it degrades pretty nicely into a format that’s more generic and not tailored to an iPhone – simply by removing the CSS and javascript links. So any mobile device can use it, and we don’t have to duplicate development efforts!

We’ll be using iUI to launch a mobile site for the library pretty soon, hopefully before the fall semester kicks in. I’m not sure how valuable my presentation slides are without my accompanying narration, but here it is just in case:

http://www.slideshare.net/chaefele/low-effort-high-impact-mobile-web-development

They may not entirely make sense without my narration, but I wanted to get them linked. I’ll try to give some context in upcoming posts.