Foursquare Graffiti Appears Across College Campuses →

This is old news, well, news from early-2010, but these little rebellions are always interesting to see:

As many universities digitize the conventions of the college visit by geotagging points of interest or including history lessons as you navigate campus via smartphone, many officials are running into issues with those defacing the community space.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Dennis M. Kratz is a big booster of the University of Texas at Dallas’s Emerging Media and Communication program here.

The arts-and-humanities dean might be surprised to find out that he is also one of the first targets of a tech craze running rampant among its students.

The fad is a free social-networking and mapping game for smartphones called Foursquare. One savvy prankster recently used it to leave some virtual graffiti on the spot of Mr. Kratz’s office: Watch out for lame jokes!

Silly? Sure. But the gag is a crude sign of what’s to come as colleges move into the Mobile Era. Sophisticated new phones can sense their locations, so people are starting to use them to create a new layer of content mapped to specific places on and around campus. These digital sticky notes can share everything from official tours to student mischief like the warning slapped on Mr. Kratz.