The Seahawk

Issue date: 2/21/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Chris Carlton [Click to enlarge]

The interactive text messaging system was released on the UNCW campus Thursday, Nov. 1 but now the program is gaining national recognition in colleges around the country.

The system currently offers access to real-time UNCW shuttle locations, emergency alerts, end-of-semester grades, on-campus movie times and several word applications, said Dr. Ronald Vetter, one of two UNCW professors spearheading the project. It works by voluntarily registered students sending a text message containing a keyword to phone number 90947. They will then receive a return text message containing the requested information.

For example, a student could send the text message "bus red" to 90947 and within seconds receive a message with the intersection where the red shuttle currently is. Students can do the same thing with grades, sending the text "grade psy 105" to get their final grade in introduction to psychology.

The word applications being offered are a spell checker, an anagram decoder and a pattern detector. Students send a possibly misspelled word, scrambled letters or one of several patterns-like words beginning with "a" and ending in "n"-to the phone number and will get a list of matches in return.

Standard text messaging rates will apply to individual students, but UNCW is paying all of the other costs of implementing the system. The currently supported cell phone carriers are AT&T, Cingular, Alltel, Boost Mobile, Cellular One, Nextel, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, Verizon and Virgin Mobile.

The system has been in development since Jan. 4, 2007, said Vetter. He partnered with Dr. Jeff Brown and the university to form Mobile Education, LLC. Mobile Education worked in close collaboration with ITSD throughout the development of the project. Vetter said once the system is in operation at UNCW he wants to begin to take it nationwide and spread it to other universities.

A testing group of 18 UNCW students has been formed to continue to revise and add to the system. The test group has already met once and will meet three more times over the course of the year.

"So far students have expressed interest in being able to text to get the daily menu at Wagoner Hall cafeteria, get live updates on sports and get texted when a course is cancelled," Vetter said.

Interested students can register by logging on to SeaPort and clicking on the text message link on the front page. There, they will fill out a short form and have to text an activation code to 90947 before they can begin to access the resources offered by the system.

"The registration process was very easy," said Michelle Pavlick, one of the students in the test group.

For more information and graphical shuttle location maps, go to http://www.uncw.edu/mobile.

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