Text Messages Improve Literacy?

Call me an old fogey, but I have yet to be swept up into the thrilling world of text messaging (probably because I tend to find that world more annoying than thrilling). However, I am apparently missing out on untold opportunities for erudition: "Mobile phones improve literacy, says researchers."

Researchers at Melbourne University are conducting trials in schools and technical colleges to see how mobile phones can boost learning and claim to be achieving remarkable success. Instead of seeing mobiles as simply communication devices, they say they can serve as hand-held computers, as the next stage along from laptops....
In an article in the journal Professional Educator, Elizabeth Hartnell-Young, a Melbourne University researcher, says it is time to give mobile phones a new name. Ms. Hartnell-Young said: "It's understandable that many educators view these phones as a huge distraction, dreadful intrusions and tools of the evil 'snapperazi'. But as with all tools of learning, once a purpose is established, mobile devices will have a role to play."
A rational behind the Melbourne project was that students are using technology they value and with which they feel comfortable. In the trials, students have used the phones' cameras to create 'digital stories' and share information. For some students who find writing difficult, the phones have improved their literacy.
As an example, Dr Hartnell-Young refers to three boys from Palmerston high school in the Northern Territory who are using the phones to develop their writing and reading skills: capturing images, writing about them, and emailing the work to friends, families and teachers. The school's principal said he had been looking for something to excite disengaged students and had been "overwhelmed by the resulting enthusiasm".
Adding to the text message mania, a novel composed entirely of text messages (The Last Messages by Finnish writer Hannu Luntiala) has entered the scene. (It was only a matter of time, I suppose.)
“I believe that, at the end of the day, a text message may reveal much more about a person than you would initially think,” said Luntiala.
But a few years earlier, Chinese author Qian Fuchang beat Luntiala to the punch...sort of. While Luntiala produced an actual physical book (made of paper, etc.) whose text itself was a series of text messages, Qian Fuchang composed a novel (Out of the Fortress) and distributed it exclusively via text messages (although he sold the rights to the novel, so it will most likely find its way to conventional print).

"Out of the Fortress," showed up on tens of thousands of mobile telephone screens on Friday. It is the text-message novel, a new literary genre for the harried masses in a society that seems to be redefining what it means to be harried.
Weighing in at a mere 4,200 characters, "Out of the Fortress" is like a marriage of haiku and Hemingway, and will be published for its audience of cellphone readers at a bite-size, 70 characters at a time - including spaces and punctuation marks - in two daily installments. Other "readers" may choose to place a call to the "publisher," hurray.com.cn, a short text-message distribution company, to listen to a recording of each day's story as it unfolds. All this for a small fee charged, like any text message, directly to the readers' mobile phone accounts.