University of Waterloo has created a Media and Mobility Network Project (MMNP), which is intended to explore and develop advanced communications solutions for students on campus.
The project’s genesis came from a recognition that a lot of the traditional phone and TV lines in the dorms were not being used as students migrated to mobile services and video downloading.
As the project definition describes, the concept has grown to become more multi-disciplinary:
The Project will dovetail with a Faculty of Arts initiative to apply research from the Humanities and Social Sciences into various means of content creation and information delivery to UW students, and to collaborate with business partners to create a business model for the digital delivery of information (news, commentary, advertising interactive content, and the like) in a post-newspaper age.
Waterloo has begun to play with some of the advanced technology and the university is seriously moving forward to change the nature of communications services being provided in the 2008-2009 school year.
Service providers should sit up and take notice.
I met with the MMNP team in early September and this group is serious about demonstrating progress. The project is especially exciting because of the diversity of the university organizations involved in shaping the project, including the types of representatives from the Faculty of Arts that can explore deeper communications issues I raised on Monday.
With the University of Waterloo’s profile among the people who are creating the next generation of technology and services, you can expect that there will be a number of folks who should be watching what is going on with Waterloo’s MMNP.