The institutional powers at my school are terrified of the Web. All of the useful online tools — grade books, attendance records, even Blackboard — are only accessible via a school-issued computer and Virtual Private Network. Course web sites have to go through various layers of approval and changes have to be sent through an extradepartmental authority.
In some ways, I understand why: here, we’re a .mil as wel as a .edu, and there have been considerable .mil hacking embarassments in the past, including one incident last semester that DoD responded to in typical fashion by shutting down practically everything on the .mil network for two days; the proverbial locking the barn door after the horse is gone.
But still: making a course LMS unavailable except via VPN that one can only access via one’s work computer with smart card properly inserted? That’s paranoia past the edge of ridiculousness. Are we somehow worried that the Chinese are going to hack Blackboard and insert subtle anti-Taiwanese and pro-planned-economy rhetoric into my lesson plan on film, Istanbul, stereotypes, and composing cultural alterity? Is Al-Qaeda going to weaken my students’ moral fiber by making them think that plagiarism is more complex and sophisticated an issue than the MPAA’s anti-theft intellectual propery rhetoric suggests? (Oh, no. Wait. I already do that.)
One challenge I’m continuing to run into is the hierarchical and monolithic nature of IT here: the Army gives all the students and all the faculty their computers, and only certain programs and practices are approved. I can’t count on students accessing the course web site via Firefox on their Ubuntu laptop at the local coffee shop: here, it’s IE, Windows Vista, and 802.11i (!) all the way, no matter what. So I can encourage them to use Open software, but really, when Uncle Sam gives you all the corporate stuff for free, incentives and evangelizing become a bit more difficult. And I can’t exactly fight Uncle Sam on this stuff.
But still. It’d be so, so nice to have simple, secure FTP access to courseware of my choice on campus websites. To have a path to Perl and my own /cgi-bin.
I know this was not the point of the post, but I just had to say that the sarcasm around the middle there was the cause of a series of major chuckles.
Well of course the Chinese are going to infiltrate your Blackboard site. Duh!
Secure that discourse, troop. Informing civilian personnel of ongoing CODENAME infiltration operations is strictly forbidden. Prepare for secure debriefing squad’s arrival at your location in 3 and 2 and 1 and
You’re using Vista already? It’s not off the conveyor belt yet, and DoD already puts it to use. Talk about getting ahead of the corporate industry and their obsolete Win2k machines…
I hear ya! I’ve encountered this problem (only the operating systems have been changed to protect something) at every academic institution I’ve worked. Since 1989, I’ve not been able to have access to an existing cgi-bin. The result? You guessed it–nada. I still dream of the ultimate cgi scripts for helping developing writers….