Besides the mobile video taken by the Palestinian student that has been played throughout the day on TV and elsewhere (taken on Nokia N70), there’s another more important question about the campus-wide alerting system in light of such tragedies. There was an incident late summer last year at Vtech, a campus manhunt for an accused double murderer, where the school relied on e-mail, the Web and messages sent to dorm phones in an attempt to alert the students.
This story from last year right after that incident says that University officials were considering following the lead of Penn State University and other schools, which use E2campus’ campus-wide alerting system. Nearly two dozen schools have signed up in the last six months.
A competing service, NYC-based Rave Wireless, even has a blog on campus mobility. We have written about them here in the past. Its system differs in that, along with allowing text alerts, it enables college police departments to monitor the locations of students, both on and off campus.