My mom owns a chain of preschools in Atlanta, Georgia. This past Easter Monday as I was preparing to fly back to Ithaca, a large storm swept through Georgia that knocked down several dozen large trees in the city. Power loss and fallen trees that were blocking the routes to the school affected one of my mom’s locations. Of course without power or access by many major routes a functional school day seemed nearly impossible, so my mom decided to cancel school for the day. As a result, it was up to my mom, the staff at this specific location, and me to get the word out to parents that school would not be held.
While this problem is not as grave as the Virginia Tech tragedy, it had stages similar to the “rescue” and “remedy” phases that Vieweg discusses. However, instead of “rescue” and “remedy” it was closer to “finding out details” and “remedy.” The remedy stage involved parents offering help with cleaning up, calling electricians, or even offering childcare to fellow parents who were expected at work. On the other hand, finding out details materialized two ways: the details the parents found out from the teachers, and the details the teachers found out from the landlord, contractors, etc. On the landlord side, my mom was in charge of contacting the landlord and roofers to see when repairs would be complete. She then had to relay this information to everyone else, who had to share it with the parents. In the parents’ case we had two people in charge of calling all 103 sets of parents and two people in charge of intercepting parents who somehow made it to the carpool line. Finally, we used Twitter.
Twitter is the perfect forum for this situation, except that only a few parents have Twitter accounts, and those parents probably do not receive alerts for updates. I would like to add a feature to services like Twitter that allow the user to send updates directly to cell phones. Of course, this would be easily abused by annoying tweeters, but if there was some sort of “business Twitter” that allows for this type of activity then emergency communication would be much more efficient.
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Even in a more frequent situation, such as school being cancelled because of snow, it was always difficult for me to find out if school were being held or not. My high school did not have a call-chain, and there really wasn’t an efficient means of communication. I either had to listen intently to the radio or discover that the doors were locked when I showed up to school. Twitter could be useful for this type of situation, but any technology that simplifies the spread of information would help. Phone calls and text messages would probably be best, though, because of expediency.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a great example of group problem solving! Part of the reason is that you need to get so much done in so little amount of time. Other than trying to spread the information about school cancellation, you needed to find out more details which is something that can be easily divided amongst people.
ReplyDeleteIt's also interesting that you bring up Twitter because while I haven't dived headfirst into the service, I know how useful it can be to spread information for people who know how to use it. At least it's one medium that parents can sign up and receive updates for next to e-mail, text messages, and phone calls. Yet, you can find this problem to be a more than difficult one to solve depending on the scale.
Consider Cornell's alert system. With so many students, what is feasible? Perhaps a little more man power is just needed.