Mobile technology holds considerable promise for sustaining educational communities, which are experiencing numerous stresses of modernity. By using portable, wirelessly connected devices, students and faculty can be made aware of interesting things that are going on just out of their sight or awareness, but just nearby. By showing them talks, laboratories, their colleagues, etc., they can be encouraged to take advantage of these opportunities more often than before.

The ActiveCampus project has developed a suite of web services for sustaining an educational community. It comprises context-aware services for staying in touch with buddies, discovering nearby activities, and physically-rooted discussions in something called digital graffiti. These entities can be visualized on maps and shown in lists. When buddies are observed to be nearby, they can be messaged with a simple one-click interface to arrange a face-to-face meeting. Graffiti can be posted at locations, on buddies and labs, and even on other graffiti, resulting in a threaded discussion. Context-awareness is achieved by a simple triangulation scheme using the signal strengths from nearby 802.11b antennae.

With this framework in place, we can now explore new methods for using ActiveCampus. We are exploring the use of programmable cell phones as a low-cost, convenient, and potentially pervasive method of access. In particular, we are using Qualcomm's Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW) services for helping people stay in touch on the university campus. We are using SOAP XML RPC to develop a standardized interface to ActiveCampus, and investigating issues of convenient access from low power, small form-factor devices.