An Exemplary Interactive Mobile Conference Website (Vision 2020 Conference)

By Wesley Fryer On September 21, 2009 · · Add Comment

Update 1/24/2012: MobileAP is now available on github.com/akinspe/mobilAP.

Last week in Hong Kong, I virtually applauded high school students from Hong Kong International School who built an iPhone/iTouch compatible website to support the 21st Century Learning at Hong Kong conference in just two weeks, using the free tool jQTouch. The student team blogged about this on Saturday. The site they created was not interactive, but it did superbly provide info about conference sessions, room locations, speaker notes, etc. for participants.

This week, I’m continuing to help prepare for the September 30th conference, “The New Renaissance: A Revolution of Creativity and Learning” scheduled for next week here in Edmond, Oklahoma. Saturday’s NewsOK article, “Creativity is focus of summit at University of Central Oklahoma,” gives some additional background about the event.

As a result of my role in the planning for the student media team supporting the conference, I’ve learned about MobilAP: The Mobile Academic Platform. MobilAP is another free alternative, in addition to jQTouch, for conference organizers who want to create an iPhone / iTouch compatible mobile website for an event. According to the MobilAP website:

MobilAP is a web-based platform for creating interactive conference and classroom experiences. It contains features like question/response, discussion, link sharing and scheduling. The cornerstone of the project is a Mobile Safari based front end that has an optimized experience for users of the iPhone and iPod touch.

This software is being released under a BSD style permissive open source license. Version 0.9 is primarily geared towards uses in conferences. Future development will concentrate on classroom uses including support for student and instructor management, as well as class schedules.

The August 2009 conference, “Vision 2020: Digital Ubiquity & University Transformation,” utilized the MobilAP platform for its interactive, mobile website. We will also be using MobilAP for next week’s Creativity Symposium at UCO. Here are some screenshots from the Vision 2020 conference mobile website‘s pages for Angus King’s keynote. As you can see, a wide variety of rich-media can be provided to conference attendees via the MobilAP platform.

I was pretty surprised to see the third referenced link on the “links” page for former Governor King’s address – I’ll need to listen to the full audio recording of his session to learn the context in which he used that link.

Has your educational conference created an interactive, mobile website to use during and following your event? If not, get some geeky folks together you know and consider using either jQTouch or MobilAP to create one. Of the two, I think MobilAP looks to be more powerful and extensible. In both cases, the price is right: FREE. 🙂

One of the Vision 2020 conference presenters addressed the MIT Mobile Web site, which is also worth checking out.

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conference, education, iphone, ipod, itouch, mobile, touch, vision, accessibility, educational, 2020