Author: andrewcareaga

Former higher ed PR and marketing guy at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) now focused on freelance writing and editing and creative writing, fiction and non-fiction.

A future-friendly Friday Five (links from @dmolsen’s #hewebar session)

I had the chance to soak up some wisdom from one of higher ed’s brightest people when it comes to the mobile web, Dave Olsen, during the opening day of HighEdWeb Arkansas. I’ve known Dave virtually for a long time now, and have always found him to be very generous with his ideas, resources and knowledge. I found out that Dave is just as generous and knowledgeable in person.

Dave’s workshop presentation was about making your organization future-friendly, and, at least during the first hour of his session — that is, until Twitter decided to shut down — those of us in attendance were doing a good job relaying Dave’s bits of wisdom to the twitterverse via the #hewebar hashtag.

Oh, well. I was planning to do a wrap-up on Dave’s session for this week’s Friday Five anyway. The absence of Twitter just forced me to do things differently. I had to write things down from Dave’s session — with a pen, on paper — rather than tweet them in the moment, stream-of-consciouslike. These written-down things include a bunch of URLs to great resources that can help you make your organization (and web presence) more future-friendly. Here are five links worth sharing.

P.S. — In an effort to more purposefully think and behave in a future-friendly way (something Olsen suggests), I bring you this Friday Five on a Thursday. You’re not really reading this in the future, it just seems that way. [Mind=blown]

  1. The future-friendly manifesto. This is your starting point for all things related to the future-friendly movement. Take a deep breath and a zen-like approach as you read immutable truths about the days ahead — thing like “Disruption will only accelerate” and “The standards process will be painfully slow.” But don’t lose heart. Persevere beyond the first paragraph to discover hope for the future.
  2. Future-Ready Content. This excellent article by Sara Wachter-Boettcher, a content strategist and writer, offers a glimpse into the world of content strategy for a future-friendly web world. It boils down to anticipating the personal preferences of various users — Sara uses a recipe as a great example — and breaking your content into micro components that can recombine in different ways. Good stuff.
  3. Mobile web best practices. Dave Olsen recommends this site for anyone wanting to learn more about the, well, best practices pertaining to all aspects of the mobile web — from content strategy and design to user experience and development.
  4. Mobilekarma.com. Once you decide on a future-friendly web strategy, you’ll need a way to test prototypes on various types of devices. Olsen recommends this site for buying secondhand, unlocked mobile devices for testing.
  5. Go mobile at Texas A&M. For anyone seeking a template for planning an institution-wide mobile strategy, Texas A&M’s approach is the gold standard, Olsen says. This site includes plenty of documentation and ideas to help you move forward.

Dave’s HEWebAR presentation in its entirety will be posted on his Slideshare site as well as on EDUniverse (along with all the other HEWebAR presentations).