Get Ahead of the Class with AT&T Campus Guide

Go back to school with the latest technology. AT&T Campus Guide connects, informs and engages college communities through an innovative mobile platform, complete with important contacts, maps, events calendars, news updates, social networking, course information and more. (PRNewsFoto/AT&T Inc.)

25 Jul 2011 14:00 Africa/Lagos


Get Ahead of the Class with AT&T Campus Guide

New Mobile Platform Connects, Informs and Engages Campus Communities

PR Newswire

DALLAS, July 25, 2011

DALLAS, July 25, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- It's time to ditch the bulky directories and printed flyers. With AT&T Campus Guide, on-the-go students, faculty, alumni and staff can access campus information right on their smartphones. Community members can check out upcoming events, catch up on university sports scores and read course materials – all without skipping a beat in their busy schedules.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110725/CG40358)

AT&T* is the first carrier to offer this type of mobile platform, an affordable, leading-edge technology for higher education institutions. The AT&T Campus Guide app, which users can download for free, works with any service provider and on most major mobile operating systems. AT&T is working with DubMeNow, a pioneer in mobilizing higher education, to bring AT&T Campus Guide to schools all over the country.

Colleges and universities using AT&T Campus Guide can customize the app, adding school colors and banners to make it their own. And with its quick and easy set-up, AT&T Campus Guide is ready to go in a matter of weeks rather than months.

AT&T Campus Guide offers nine different features:

* Courses: Students can connect with classmates and professors in real-time using AT&T Campus Guide, viewing grades, assignments, announcements and detailed class information.
* Events: Wondering when the next big game is? Not sure when exams start? The events calendar on AT&T Campus Guide provides important dates and times for campus happenings.
* Directory: Search and browse contact information and connect with other students and faculty, without paging through a campus phonebook.
* Maps: Freshmen, visiting students and alumni will particularly appreciate campus maps and turn-by-turn directions between buildings.
* Notifications: Timely notifications announce school cancellations and remind students about overdue library books, tuition payments and more.
* News: Find the latest campus news, sports scores and Tweets – all in one place.
* Friends: An always up-to-date and backed-up address book of all students' classmates, friends and campus contacts. Any time students lose or replace their phones, they can just reinstall the AT&T Campus Guide app to their new phones and all of their contacts are restored.
* My Card: Students can easily share their customizable contact information to keep in touch with their friends, classmates, potential employers, alumni and advisors..
* Info: Looking for more information? Click on Info for miscellaneous details about campus.


"Students gravitate toward schools that have the best resources, the best technology," said Chris Hill, Vice President, Advanced Mobility Solutions, AT&T Business Solutions. "They're mobile and they're looking for colleges and universities that are mobile too. AT&T Campus Guide supports community engagement and communication in a comprehensive and cost-effective manner."

"More than 600 schools currently license our platform to connect, inform and engage their students and campus communities," said Manoj Ramnani, CEO of DubMeNow. "With nearly 4,000 U.S. colleges and universities eager to catch up on mobile, the AT&T Campus Guide application gives campus leaders an effective way to draw students' interest. Our mobile platform, which powers AT&T Campus Guide, offers advanced integration, configuration, management and administration features in a complete solution."

AT&T will begin pre-selling AT&T Campus Guide on July 29th. Schools that participate in the pilot period (July 29th through September 29th) will receive the application free of charge until October 1st.

AT&T is dedicated to supporting education with products and services that help institutions improve productivity both in and out of the classroom. In addition, AT&T's University Advantage Program provides tailored contracts and discounts for colleges and universities.

For more information on AT&T Campus Guide, visit: http://go-att.us/CampusGuide.

*AT&T products and services are provided or offered by subsidiaries and affiliates of AT&T Inc. under the AT&T brand and not by AT&T Inc.

About Powered by DUB

Powered by DUB is the first comprehensive and intuitive open, mobile application platform for higher education, associations and events. The Powered by DUB platform allows organizations to connect, inform and engage with their community. For more information, visit http://www.poweredbydub.com or email sales@poweredbydub.com.

About AT&T

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) is a premier communications holding company. Its subsidiaries and affiliates – AT&T operating companies – are the providers of AT&T services in the United States and around the world. With a powerful array of network resources that includes the nation's fastest mobile broadband network, AT&T is a leading provider of wireless, Wi-Fi, high speed Internet, voice and cloud-based services. A leader in mobile broadband and emerging 4G capabilities, AT&T also offers the best wireless coverage worldwide of any U.S. carrier, offering the most wireless phones that work in the most countries. It also offers advanced TV services under the AT&T U-verse® and AT&T | DIRECTV brands. The company's suite of IP-based business communications services is one of the most advanced in the world. In domestic markets, AT&T Advertising Solutions and AT&T Interactive are known for their leadership in local search and advertising.

Additional information about AT&T Inc. and the products and services provided by AT&T subsidiaries and affiliates is available at http://www.att.com. This AT&T news release and other announcements are available at http://www.att.com/newsroom and as part of an RSS feed at www.att.com/rss. Or follow our news on Twitter at @ATT.

© 2011 AT&T Intellectual Property. All rights reserved. Mobile broadband not available in all areas. AT&T, the AT&T logo and all other marks contained herein are trademarks of AT&T Intellectual Property and/or AT&T affiliated companies. All other marks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE AT&T Inc.

CONTACT: Jessica Rich, +1-212-453-2327, jr105t@att.com, or Melissa (Mirabile) Salottolo, +1-212-453-2327, mmirabil@attnews.us, both of AT&T Corporate Communications

Web Site: http://www.att.com

“Word, Shout, Song: Lorenzo Dow Turner Connecting Communities through Language”

“Word, Shout, Song: Lorenzo Dow Turner Connecting Communities through Language” On View at the Anacostia Community Museum through March, 27, 2011

Example of Gullah speech as recorded by Lorenzo Dow Turner – Transcription

Washington, DC, August 11, 2010 /PRNewswire/ — The Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum presents the groundbreaking exhibition “Word, Shout, Song: Lorenzo Dow Turner Connecting Communities through Language” on view from Aug. 9 through March 27, 2011. Curated by Alcione Amos and the first exhibition based almost entirely on one of the museum’s special collections, “Word, Shout, Song” looks at the life, research and scholarship of Lorenzo Dow Turner, perhaps the first African American linguist. It also focuses on how his discoveries linked communities in Africa to the New World through language.

“In assembling this exhibition, most exciting to me was how I was able to connect words from Portuguese, Gullah and English to their African origins, 80 years later, based on Turner’s work in the 1930s,” said Amos. “His work is still relevant today.”

“Word, Shout, Song” is three stories in one: scholarship and success against the odds, a quest to crack a linguistic code and a discovery spanning continents. The exhibition presents Turner’s pioneering work, which in the 1930s established that people of African heritage, despite slavery, had retained and passed on their cultural identity through words, music and story wherever they landed. His research focused on the Gullah/Geechee community in South Carolina and Georgia, whose speech was dismissed as “baby talk” and “bad English.” He confirmed, however, that quite to the contrary the Gullah spoke a Creole language and that they still possessed parts of the language and culture of their captive ancestors. Turner’s linguistic explorations into the African diaspora led him to Bahia, Brazil, where he further validated his discovery of African continuities.

The exhibition begins with a look at Turner’s early life. He was profoundly influenced by his Howard University-educated father—a fourth-generation freed man forced to flee his home after an altercation with a white man—on the importance of academic excellence. Turner (1890-1972) obtained successively higher degrees in English from Howard, Harvard University and the University of Chicago. Denied teaching positions at white institutions, he built his career in academia at several black colleges, including his alma mater where as a student he had become interested in languages. A summer stint teaching at the now-South Carolina State University, however, is where he first heard and was captivated by the Gullah dialect. Convinced that the speech pattern was not illiterate English but instead a distinct language incorporating words and structure from African languages, Turner focused his interest into a lifelong project.

Turner studied various African language, including Twi, Ewe, Yoruba, Bambara and Wolof as well as Arabic, to make linkages to Gullah vocabulary. Through his pursuit of information, he often became the first African American member of many organizations, including the Linguistics Society of America.

“Word, Shout, Song” recounts his travels to South Carolina and Georgia and abroad to London, Paris and, finally, Africa to record and compare the speech of hundreds of informants. His journeys feature fascinating stories of adventure and discovery as well as the difficulties he encountered with bulky equipment and remote access.

A major linguistic achievement occurred when Turner determined the possibility that the “ring shout,” a Gullah religious dance, was directly inherited from enslaved Muslims—the name “shout” derived from the Arabic word Sha’wt, which had to do with movement around a sacred object rather than sound. Resulting from Turner’s early Georgia recordings is a later major discovery by scholars Joseph Opala, Tazieff Schmidt and Cynthia Koroma who, in 1990, realized that a song passed down through generations connected the Mende people of Sierra Leone to their American descendents in Georgia.

A section of the exhibition focuses on Turner’s research on culture in Bahia where a much larger number of Africans had been brought as captives than to the United States, along with the same languages influencing the Gullah. African survivals were particularly seen in the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomble, and when informants recognized words in the Sea Island recordings, Turner, again, saw language connecting the worlds of the African diaspora. Turner’s many writings, presentations and publications included his book, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, published in 1949, and still the standard reference for Creole language research today.

Highlights of “Word, Shout, Song” include:

* The Bilali Diary written by a Muslim slave
* Turner’s recording device and special-character typewriter
* The vestment of a Candomblé initiate
* Rare recordings of Gullah speech and songs and rare photographs of informants produced by Turner
* Audio and written comparisons of words that are similar and from languages spoken in the Americas and Africa
* The section “Singing for the Ancestor: A Song that Made the Roundtrip to Africa”
* The section “The Black Seminole: The Gullah that Got Away” that recounts the history of fugitive slaves from Georgia and South Carolina, whose descendents are now found in Florida, Mexico and Texas and who speak an ancient form of Gullah

About the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum

The Anacostia Community Museum opened in southeast Washington in 1967 as the nation’s first federally funded neighborhood museum. Adopting its current name in 2006, the museum has expanded its focus from an African American emphasis to examining the impact of contemporary social issues on urban communities. For more information on the museum, the public may call (202) 633-4820, (202) 633-1000 or (202) 633-5285 (TTY); for tours, call (202) 633-4844. Website: anacostia.si.edu.

Note to editor: Images for publicity can be obtained from http://newsdesk.si.edu.
Media website: http://newsdesk.si.edu; http://anacostia.si.edu (media room)

Media Contact:
Marcia Baird Burris
(202) 633-4876
(202) 320-1735 (cell)
bairdburrism@si.edu


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