The tales of colleges being unable to implement any good practice involving IT (as defined by, amongst others, our HMIe overlords friends) are legion. Most of it is related to the baffling willingness of educators to allow support staff to dictate how we should teach.
While I can see the reasons for
blocking certain sites containing, for example, porn, and the rules for access to
JANET are clear, the stories of colleges blocking perfectly usable sites are mounting and becoming more ridiculous by the day.
Why, in the name of all that’s
Web 2.0, does a
college of my acquaintance block
Google Mail? Or
Google Docs come to that? Descriptors abound requiring students to access
newsgroups. Only problem is many colleges block
NNTP traffic. Why? Even worse why, when asked to unblock this traffic, do
system administrators refuse on spurious “security” reasons?
And why do we let them! The same applies to e-mail or chats.
If any administrator can come up with a sensible reason for this, and that excludes any explanation that includes the phrase “in case”, then I’d love to hear it.
It’s the 21st century. I spend half my time listening to tales of there not being enough IT equipment and the other half hearing that students are unable to bring their own laptops into colleges. Is there a relationship here?
The bottom line is this. Support services are there to support and if
education is being compromised then we have to address this; and sooner rather than later.
Weblogg-ed » Filter Fun
