University Used Instant Messages to Communicate After Fire
In the wake of a devastating fire at Our Lady of the Lake University last month, university officials didn’t rely on phone calls or e-mail to keep the university community connected. They couldn’t. The fire was in the campus’s main building and had knocked the entire e-mail and phone networks out for about three days.
Instead, the community relied on an instant-messaging service. Shortly before the fire, the university had integrated an IM platform into their campus IT structure. The university had not invited students and faculty to use the service yet.
When a massive fire blazed through the main campus building on May 6, though, the institution’s IT administrators began updating the community through Blackboard and urging students and instructors to download the IM client (Pronto, a platform from Wimba).
Read more about Our Lady of the Lake’s recovery!