A new speech-enabled mobile Web application program at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., earns an “A” for allowing students easy access to applications designed to enrich their mobile lives.

The MobileU program is offered in partnership with IBM and aims to assist students with such mundane tasks as doing laundry and locating a campus shuttle bus.

MobileU uses IBM WebSphere Everyplace Multimodal Environment Software on mobile phones from Sprint and Cingular Wireless, although the school is working to select a single carrier. Igor Jablokov, program director of IBM's WebSphere Multimodal and Voice Portals, said the application has already been used with success in hospitals to speech enable information there.

So far 100 students are participating in the program, which was introduced in fall 2005 on a trial basis.

The program is really meant to simplify students' lives, said Jay Dominick, assistant vice president for information systems and chief information officer for the university. He said Wake Forest was among the first in the country to provide laptop computers to its students in 1996.

“The university has had a real focus on technology for a long time, so it believes that the use of technology is critical for what we do as faculty and students but also preparing our students for work in the world that they're eventually going to be in,” Dominick said.

But Dominick said students' patterns have been changing as the world becomes increasingly mobile. “Students aren't e-mail centric anymore, they're not using telephones in the residence halls. They're increasingly mobile, they're increasingly using IM and they're increasingly messaging SMS,” he said. “They see their parents and friends tied to this BlackBerry world, and they're fitting things in all the time into five-minute segments.”

MobileU uses Windows mobile smartphones that allow students to access PowerPoint presentations and documents from their instructors, in addition to e-mail and calendar software. Other applications include shuttle bus tracking, which will tell the student how many minutes until the next bus. Global positioning satellite devices inside the buses use GPRS cellular technology to transmit location information from buses to servers on campus to the MobileU phones. The same technology also allows students to pull up the school's library catalog search page when entering that building. They can even find out how many parking spaces are available in a particular school lot before they arrive at their destination — sensors at checkpoints keep track of how many cars are parked any particular time.

Another application, LaundryView, allows speech-enabled laundry monitoring via a Web site. Students living in specially designed Technology Quarters residence halls can use their phones to find out how many laundry machines are in use in their area.

“We've been trying to find a way to use mobile technology to give the students a device that they can use for communications … that they can use for classroom work and that they can use for keeping in touch with the university,” Dominick said. “While the laptops are very mobile, they're not as mobile as the cell phone is.”