God Bless Virginia Tech

Well it has certainly been a while since my last post (Internet trouble, etc.), but on the good side, I have lots of things that I have wanted to write about over the past couple weeks!
On a heavy note, I wanted to acknowledge the awful tragedy that occurred on the Virginia Tech campus not too long ago. So many unnecessary deaths, unprompted violence..it's baffling. Being a college student, I really can't even get my mind around the enormity of this event. I mean our parents send us off to college, warning us not to drink too much, to party too hard - always walk with a friend especially at night...and then this happens?! In the 'protected' environment of a school building classroom?? My heart certainly goes out to all VT students, faculty, & staff, and even more so to the victims, and their friends and families.
This incident of course sparked a series of "What If's?" and prompted analysis on many other college campuses, including UD. Students here are now being asked to post their cellphone numbers online so that we can be on the list to receieve group text messages in the event of an emergency. Strangely enough, the horror at VT also led to some discussion related to the topics I have been studying in my classes, including this class as well as my English class. In ENGL312 (Written communication in business), we were scheduled to discuss Crisis Communication right around the time of the shootings. Oddly enough, the incident fit right into our curriculum & actually sparked a lot of coversation that relates to topics in this course (477). Basically, there was a lot of finger pointing and lots of debate over how the events of the crisis were communicated to the students and staff at VT while all of this was occuring and beyond. Basically, VT did not necessarily do the best job informing the campus of the first shooting (because they did it through e-mail over 2 hours after it occurred). The campus was not locked down & then the second part of this massacre happened.
All of these happenings forced VT & many other colleges & universities throughout the nation (including UD) to look at their emergency communication plan, rightfully so. And all if this comes down to the question: what is the best way to communicate in the event of a crisis? And that answer has changed over the years, which many campuses including VT had failed to acknowledge. Relating to our couse, social media & forms of communication have changed & the best way to communicate with a campus in the event of an emergency has been determined to be mass text messaging and blogging.
If nothing else, we can see that courses such as this (Info Tech in Marketing) are very important to add to our course curriculum because the world IS changing. VT actually started asking students to update their facebook accounts to let people know that they were ok. And UD is now asking all students to post their cellphone number online so that we can be a part of the audience to receive a mass text message if that becomes necessary. It is unfortunate that it took an event like this to make us change our ways, but perhaps lives will be saved down the line in learning from this catastrophic event.