Last week I attended the HighEdWeb Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Much of the discussion I participated in at the conference was about how to make your website “responsive”, which means to adapt the look-and-feel of your site to work with different screen resolutions, important for supporting the growing number of mobile devices and tablets. There were excellent presentations given by the web teams from Notre Dame (click for video) and the University of Nebraska (click for video) on this topic and I was able to attend a meet-up of about twenty web developers to further discuss responsive design.

While setting breakpoints using CSS media queries and worrying about lazy-loading lower resolution images and content scrolls are endlessly fascinating to me, I know that these are issues of niche interest. For those interested in how mobile technology is being applied in the classroom, Kyle Bowen from Purdue (click for video) talked about their program to solicit questions during lectures through the backchannel. Students submit questions through their app or through Twitter, Facebook, or other streams, an algorithm determines which questions are the most pertinent and then gives the instructor a list of topics they may wish to clarify. There’s more information about this on the Purdue Studio site and this write-up for EduCause.