College Campus Alerts

(WUSA)) -- It didn't take long for students at Virginia Tech to start using technology as a way to share information. They used their cell phones to capture the horrifying minutes. They posted the images on their medium of choice: the social networking sites of MySpace, Facebook and YouTube.

"We know the large majority of first responders are citizens, people, close by and we need to create a training program to make them responsible responders. And to engage them in a practical way," says Ben Shneiderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland.

Shneiderman is researching the idea of Community Response Grids, based on the social networking concept.

"You see a map of the campus over here," says Shneiderman pointing to a mock example of his grid concept on a computer screen in his office.

Shneiderman envisions students and faculty--who pre-register--hitting speed-dial 9 on their cell phones when they see an emergency.

"Suddenly 5 people have pressed their speed dial 9 button. And we get the location of each of those," says Shneiderman pointing to 5 red dots that pop up on his computer screen.

Emergency responders and trained volunteers get the calls. The users could also send text messages, video and stills to the community grid computer system.

"So we would click on them to see what's happening," says Shneiderman.

In turn, emergency responders could immediately send emails and text messages to the mobile devices of those who could be, or are, in the danger zone.

"Or they could phone back to the people who had sent the message and say what do you see? What's going on?" says Shneiderman.

Right now university officials all over the country are re-assessing how they communicate emergencies to their communities.

Prior to the Virginia Tech tragedy, only a handful of colleges and universities in our area used text messaging to cell phones as a way to communicate with students and faculty. The University of Maryland has just signed up for a service and other schools tell 9NEWS NOW they are looking into it.

Every school in our area has a blast email system. However, due to limited technology, it can take 20 minutes to an hour for everyone in the alphabet to get the message.

"We have the ability to stop every other message in our system so that if we have an emergency that needs to go out it certainly takes priority," says Julie Green Bataille, a spokesperson for Georgetown University.

"We would anticipate that simultaneous to that we would have a series of other mechanisms in place informing people what to do," says Bataille.

Georgetown is one of a few campuses in the area that has an emergency siren. Some schools have police cars with loud speakers or bullhorns to relay information.

Georgetown also has a campus television station that can get information out.

Several schools in our area also have internal radio stations.

However, when 9NEWS NOW spoke with some students at various campuses in the area, several told us they knew about blast emails but nothing about sirens, internal radio or television stations.

Which brings us back to Ben Shneiderman's grid and any alert system.

You can have all the alert systems in the world, but people need to know about them and be trained in them.