Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Focus
The Age of the Smart Cell Phone
12/29/2005
As text messaging overtakes cell networks, converged devices emerge and e-mail moves to the keypad.
Less than 10 years after becoming a critical workday tool for most of us, college e-mail may be on the verge of becoming yesterday’s technology. In fact, in the business world, analysts and others predict that the use of instant messaging will surpass e-mail sometime next year—if not sooner. The push will come faster on college campuses, where new consumer-side technologies often find their first footholds. Any college administrator can attest to the popularity of IM-ing.
Text Messaging Changes Everything
But an even more compelling next communications wave is text messaging, now hugely popular with junior high and high school students. Although instant messaging can be conducted over cell phones, it’s more commonly accomplished between computers. With its clever shorthand for just about everything, however, text messaging was born to exploit cell phones. As any parent of a teen will tell you, a cell phone’s tiny 10-key pad is no communication obstacle to an adept text messenger. In Europe and Asia, text messaging has been rampant for years. That’s partly because the cost structure encourages it: Texting in Europe is usually cheaper than making a phone call. In the US, cell phone plans that sell huge buckets of voice minutes erase that benefit.
Despite that, text messaging is starting to move onto US college campuses, where seniors don’t tend to use it as much as first-year students do. And as text messaging rolls across college campuses, the importance of cell phones can hardly be overstated. Worldwide sales of mobile phones just passed the two-billion-phone mark, headed for three billion by 2009. Actually, that number will probably be reached earlier, since the two-billion mark was achieved well before previous predictions.
The Devices Converge
Not surprisingly (given Steve Job’s ability to drive trends of late), Apple’s cellphone/iPod combo points to a growing reality: the convergence of small wireless devices and big computing power. As processing chips and memory get smaller, faster, and cheaper, more and more, cell phones turn into full-fledged computers.
Schools like Wake Forest University (NC) are finding ways to embrace this trend. The private liberal arts institution is currently trying out converged Pocket PC devices in a pilot project involving 120 students and staff. Each student was given a Pocket PC this past fall, with the option of cell phone service. Pocket PCs, made by companies such as Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba, essentially combine high-end wireless PDA functions and cell phones in a single device. The pilot devices come with instant and text messaging, plus software.
According to Wake Forest CIO Jay Dominick, the study is beginning to suggest that a PDA-plus-phone is a far more compelling device for students than a mere e-mail account or standard PDA device.
Recommended Reading
- Sun, Stanford Working To Archive History
In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world's history, right up to today.
- The Quilt Coalition Rolls Out XO Communications for High-Capacity Network Services
The Quilt, a coalition of 28 regional network organizations, has added XO Communications Services to its authorized vendor list. The Quilt represents 200 universities and thousands of other educational institutions across the United States. With this new relationship, Quilt members can purchase XO's high-speed IP transit and network transport services at competitive rates.
- Wimba Classroom 5.2 Expands Classroom Capture Support, Adds MP3 Downloads
At the NECC 2008 conference in Texas this week, Wimba launched a new version of Wimba Classroom, the virtual classroom component of the company's Collaboration Suite. The new 5.2 release expands options for classroom capture and adds a variety of other functional and ease of use features.
- Automation Chimera: Education Is Not Management
The lure of automating workflow online so human intervention is minimized is continually reinforced in the minds of higher education administrators by examples of automated campus systems such as financials, student information systems, and other enterprise systems. But what's good for management is not always good for learning.
- Cognos Releases BI Software for Linux-based IBM System z Mainframe
Cognos, which IBM acquired in January, has released an update to its business intelligence software that will run on the Linux operating system on IBM System z mainframes. IBM Cognos 8 BI was being developed by the two companies prior to the acquisition, but assimilation of Cognos into IBM accelerated development.
- Facebook and Collegiality: A Serendipitous Social Niche
Facebook is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.
