Web 2.0 Untangled: Richard Francis on MobileBrookes & closing thoughts

Finally the day was finished by Richard Francis talking about the MobileBrookes project.

He started by giving us some background- telling us that PCs were dying, that c.60% of people at Cardiff University had smart phones, and that soon all our students would have smart phones capable of accessing the internet.

The MobileBrookes project is an spin-off of the MobileOxford project http://m.ox.ac.uk/, an attempt to build a set of web-based apps that can run on any smart phone. The plan at Brookes is to have the apps able to look up lecturer’s contact details, to guide you to your library or lecture, and to give new students guided tours using just their phones. It all sounded very exciting, although most of their apps weren’t running yet and I was rather worried about the digital divide- if smart phones become increasingly essential, what about the students who can’t afford smart phones?

In conclusion it was a great day, with a range of talks between theoretical and very practical. Lots of interesting things to ponder, and probably some tools I'll take away and use in my library. If I could have changed one thing, I probably would have had one less speaker- this would have given us more time for questions and answers. This in turn would have made the day less about passively being-presented-to and more of a dynamic process: after all, this is what Web 2.0 is all about!

(“Web 2.0 Untangled” was a day-long conference organised by CILIP’s UC&R BBO and CoFHE MidWest Circle, held at Wolfson College on the 24th November 2010. It featured 7 speakers on a variety of topics. I attended thanks to Oxford staff development funding. A condition of this funding is to write-up your experience of the session to pass around your colleagues in Oxford- which is what I'm doing here!)