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Campus Pipeline: Schools Selling Students' Eyes
magnanamous_cow_herd writes: "This semester i returned to the university to finally finish off my degree,
and after going to the computer center to re-activate my e-mail account, the
helpdesk guy started telling me about this fabulous new service called Campus
Pipeline
I looked into it a bit and found out that there are over 400 universities who
signed up with this company to provide them with a shiny new "free" advertising-supported
student intranet in exchange for many many eyeballs.
They claim they are positioned to become the fifth largest portal on the Internet.
I'd like to know what the Slashdotters think about this. Here is the only article
I found on this "service" that was even questioning it."
This university just started Campus Pipeline this semester. All of the services it encompasses were a part of the university already, their program just provides easy access to all, with only one login. I have used it and it is great, but I still use the normal methods for everything from checking mail to changing courses. They have a great idea and this is perfect for novice computer users, and the great thing is, the advanced users by no means have to use the service. VT did the right thing by leaving the option open and not forcing students to use Campus Pipeline. They should be patted on the back for not screwing that up at least. Go Hokies!
The point is, the advertising is going to be there. Whether it is the big Starbucks sign in the cafeteria, the Coke logo on the scoreboard, or a banner ad on the intranet.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Corporate influence in the schools has been covered here on slashdot before and this is a good example of the crap that is going on.
.com model that has been failing pretty badly as a whole. I would never invest in such companies.
A lot of the problem is with bloated Universities who have no financial feedback mechanism (much like the government) so while the school might be making good money, the budget is streched thin anyway with uneeded high level management types, etc. Not that mass privatising is a good solution (I would never recommend it myself).
These days it's easier to get funding for new prisons than it is for education. I think California is a good example. I beleive they are now putting more money into law enforcement than education. Not a good sign, and not a good way to improve the world.
Years ago I think programs like this would have been rejected out of hand. In today's world colleges and universities are run more as corporations. By this I'm not referring to the increasing corporate control, but as in being bottom line money driven. Therefore money saving schemes like this often look attractive to college administrators at the expense of their students.
This companies business model is also suspect, it's the typical
For shame, for shame, bringing commercialism into the sacred grove of academe.
Thankfully, there was nothing like this when I matriculated, and I was able to fully enjoy watching the Penn State Nittany Lions beat the Miami Hurricanes in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl while sipping my Budweiser under the alluring glance of my Free Bud-Girls poster.
I noticed this quote in the University Business article which was linked to from the orig. posting...
"According to a study of on-line teens released this spring by Northstar Interactive, 93 percent between the ages of 13 and 18 had used the Web, and 97 percent had sent and received e-mail"
Well...duh. If you're conducting a study of ON-LINE teens, wouldn't you guess that most of them had used the web and/or email? That would be like saying that 97 of teens exiting a voting booth had voted. The only suprise is that the percentage is so LOW. Don't you love statistics? It's a good article otherwise though. :-)
And as for the online teens who hadn't used the web or email... just what the hell were they doing online exactly? There's plenty of things to do online besides the web and email, but it's kind of hard to imagine being online WITHOUT using one of the two...
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
I remember logging in once long after I signed up (out of curiosity, of course) to check my new, hip CollegeClub e-mail address. It had seven messages, all of which went like this:
The good news: CollegeClub went out of business this year. The bad news: they were taken over by Student Advantage, who also pays college students to shill for their crappy discount card. (Wow, 5% off at Joe's Pretzel Shop! Fifty cents off at Starbucks when you buy five lattes! This rules!)
For more information, click here.
A while back I read a really interesting article in Linux Journal about "Mediated Reality" (using eyeglasses whose display can filter out things you don't want to see in the real world -- like advertisements). The article was fascinating in itself, but it really put a point to why I dislike most of advertising.
It mentioned (animated) web banners which portray a moving mouse pointer and explain that it is an obvious attempt to capture the users' attention. In the end, this is what all advertising is attempting to do. They don't care about eyeballs, they want you to give your attention, your precious time, to their marketroid message.
It's also like a company which I've seen here in Atlanta, GA, USA called "Promove" which has brick-and-mortars set up to connect apartment hunters with vacant apartments. The buildings and signs are painted bright yellow. Why? Because they know that it is a psychological fact that yellow is the most eye-grabbing color. People are just naturally drawn to look at it. In the end, just another scheme to steal peoples' attention.
And that's what all advertising is: A scheme to steal peoples' attention. This is why I hate most advertising. It is the attempt of companies to use psychological tricks to take my attention and my time which is rightfully mine, and which companies have no right to.
I agree that advertising on television is acceptable, for it delivers a free service to the viewers. The viewers pay with their attention. I think that magazines and newspapers which charge a subscription fee are immoral. Why would I pay to have my attention diverted towards someone else's financial gain? I pay to look at what I want to look at, not what Frito-Lay wants me to look at! I think that advertising billboards should be illegal: the advertiser gets the viewer's attention and the viewer gets ... nothing (plus it's unsafe, people are trying to drive for God's sake!). And I think that T-Shirts which say "Tommy Hilfiger" boldly on the front is a testament to how stupid many of us have become.
And to those people who say, "It's just a few more ads, get over it, we're already inundated with ads, stop whining!" I reply: your time and your attention may be worthless to you, but to me they are my most precious resource, and I reserve the right to whine, bitch, and complain about their loss as much as I so please.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
An all too common problem in trying to predict future trends is falling for the fallacy of taking trends to their logical extreme. In this case, you take the trend that people are showing more drone like behavior and extending it to the extreme that we will all become drones.
Point taken however I think this point in history is far more dangerous than past ones because of the rate at which information (or in this case disinformation) flows. It's much harder to fight something that everybody "knows" is true than something that everybody hasn't heard of yet. That's the danger of the media. Most people out there (a generalization I know) watch the news and take it hook, line, and sinker to be the truth. Unfortunate but also very very real.
Historically trends are cyclical. Stretches of group think are followed by stretches of individualistic rebellion. Look at what's happening right now. We see countless protests being staged by people who are fet up with corporatism and globalization. Are these people becoming drones?
No they are not but I think that they are also too small in number. Corporate America(tm) has a very loud voice - it's going to take a lot of people to drown it out. As for historical trends - you are correct. But do you want to wait that long to get your freedoms back?
I think you are way underestimating the desire to be an individual in human beings. There is a desire to be part of a community and to identify with others, but there is also an ego driven desire to distinguish yourself from the crowd.
I do not count the spirit of the individual out but I also am more pessimistic about the strength of Corporate America(TM). There's a lot of things you can do with large amounts of money to make sure the truth does not get told and I think some of those things are being put in place as we speak.
The Tick - "Spoon!"
NEO - "There is no spoon."
"Bah!" - Dogbert
I personally don't use it, but it is not an inherently bad thing. Also, I may be mistaken, but it seems like Campus Pipeline helped pay for some of the hardware setup along with software costs for the system. So overall everyone is a winner. Soon with browsers such as mozilla that allow easily blocking images from specific hosts, you won't even have to view the ads.
The article mentioned by /. says the software is free, but doesn't mention that you need to buy a pretty expensive Solaris box to run it on. And I guess university IT departments have plenty of available manhours to administrater the system, huh?
Campus Pipeline appears to promise the world to everyone. They say they can tie existing university systems together (with Java). They say they will be coming out with a version that runs on Linux. I think they are simply a company spin-off that was aiming at a big bucks IPO (before that bubble burst).
Faculty on many campuses don't like it and are putting up a fuss. That, plus the fact that the IRS is looking at taxing income unrelated to an educational institutions "primary mission", may be putting the brakes on Campus Pipeline implimentation.
Yes, Campus Pipeline is (at best) tacky but the fact that many institutions are hopping in bed with them is a result of the financial pressure that many universities are under in the face of State government funding cutbacks.
Curious George
***General Consultant to the Human Race*** My opinions are free. You get what you pay for.
Okay, I attend Westark Community College in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Since our college here has recently inflicted this program upon us, I have a few things to say about it.
I don't mind the ads so much, its just that this whole system is designed not to help the student, but instead to sell them things. Maybe I don't want to spend 20 minutes checking my mail each day..maybe i want to spend them studying.
Anyway, on an unrelated note, yesterday i noticed that one of the e-mails I'd received was sent to "everyone@collegename.edu". Thinking it was too easy to be true, i sent a limerick to the address (really short rhyming dirty poem). Turns out my limerick went to ALL the faculty! Had I been thinking clearly, I would have sent it anonymously, and probably would have sent an essay on why pipeline sucks. As it stands now, my Pipeline access was promptly suspended after a chat with the Dean today. Ah well....i guess i really deserved that. (if any of the faculty read this, i profusely apologize!) I certainly won't miss Pipeline, though.
-- Juju
An example: there is, naturally, a section on printers. At the bottom of the page is a picture of a Hewlett-Packard inkjet that looks better than what you see in a four-color catalog. A half-dozen pages later is a focus on two innovators in technology, Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard. The facing page has a spotlight on a company on a cutting edge--Hewlett-Packard. Flip to the section on E-Commerce, and there's a screenshot of the Hewlett-Packard online store showing somebody about to buy--you guessed it--a Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer. There are also multiple pictures of Pavillions, etc., scattered throughout the rest of the book.
HP isn't the only offender, not by a long shot. AMD gets an "oh-by-the-way" mention in the body of the text, but all the pictures, charts, and examples show Intel processers, chipsets, etc. Office programs only come from Microsoft, period (and, yes the first technological innovator is Bill and the first cutting-edge company is Microsoft).
The sidebar on how voice recognition works is probably a direct quote from the side of the Via Voice box. It mentions all of the great things that voice recognition can do, and how Via Voice is the best program to do all that. Would you be surprised if I told you that a few pages later was a bio of Lou Gerstner and a puff piece on IBM?
Sun is only mentioned a couple times, and then only for Java. Java isn't even listed as a programming language, but instead as a two-paragraph description of multimedia enhancements to web pages, right after Shockwave.
Iomega is the only company that makes removeable mass storeage.
Oh--and I forgot: this textbook is "web-enhanced" by CNN. At the end of every chapter is instructions to go to a CNN web page where you can watch movie clips about the preceeding material. So, naturally, the chapter on processors has a movie bio of Andy Grove and another multimedia something-or-other about Intel.
I think I should shut up now before I break an O-ring....
Well, okay one last comment: I all but told the students to take the books back, and I'm supplying them with my own resources or pointers to web pages, etc.
0-7895-5937-4
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Instead of pimping out students, they could have better software and keep some respect.
Emphasis mine:
I don't feel compelled to go buy the product, check out the website, or punch the monkey to win prizes. Hmmm, perhaps it's the lack of subliminals...
Yeah, those ads just go right under your mental radar...
Jay (=
(OK, to be fair, if you can't name the product/service the ad is for, it's not a very successful ad...)
The first time they approached the people who run the network. They wanted us to use their modifed browser on all computers at the university. This included all privatly owned computers in the dorms as well as faculty computers in offices, and even dial-in users. Additionally the university would be required to provide network access to C.P. so that they could sell their "service" to private appartment complexes in the area. No guarntee that those appartments would not have USU students. We are not allowed by law to provide network access to people not associated with the university. And one other little thing...they wanted a 5-year exclusive contract with no commitment on C.P.'s part that they would upgrade any part of their system to keep up with the times. We were to trust that they would.
So, we were supposed to force everyone associated with the university to use a specific browser. We were also supposed to provide Internet access to anyone that happend to live in an appartment where they resold our bandwidth. We got a 10% kickback on the net proffits and we would be stuck with it for five years. We said no.
The second time they approached the university administration directly. The story they told them was "hey look, FREE MONEY!" Since administrators tend to be whores, they were for it. I mean what problem could there be with free money? FREE MONEY! Additionally they "gave" transmiters, radios, etc., to the university to get a high speed connection to the president's home. This was a gift "free from obligation." It took an act of war on us mere techies to convince the administration that this was not a good idea. After it was clear that we were not going to bite C.P. took back the "gift" of the free radio link equipment.
There are lotst of details that are too messy to get into, but we figured that this would be a tar baby, and we would be sorry if we had taken the offer.
-g
The problem is that these kids have about the same credit history (no credit history) as the ones with no money, so they give the cards to everyone, and eat the poor/irresponsible kids' debt with the profit from the rich parents/irresponsible kids' spending.
---
I am the dot in slashdot.org
The students, staff, and faculty WILL use pipeline for all their e-mail. POP, IMAP, alternate e-mail clients are not allowed because if you get your e-mail that way, you won't see the wonderful advertisements.
It's horrible, but I have no choice besides just up and quit...
(And I *am* an anonymous coward and have good reason to be! :)
It seems to me that colleges & universities should lose the "Academic" pricing of their computer software because it is now being used for commercial advertising.
I know here at RIT, we can't use systems for comemrcial gain because that's in the terms of our academic licensing... but I wonder how a system like this would affect that status...
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
I attend Appalachian State University in Boone NC. My school began beta testing Campus Pipeline sometime last fall, and let me tell you it sucks. I work at the help desk on campus and I have had nothing but trouble with the beast. It is slow, requires java and is prone to crashes, which causes a 1000 calls to the help desk "Help I cant get my email". It sucks to have to explain that it is Campus Pipline's fault. Why cant the school just set up a pop server? Hell I had rather use Pine over VMS or UNIX.
It really ticks me off that I pay to attend an University and I get spam in my inbox because the university wants more money.
I think the concensious (sp?) here at AppState is that Campus Pipeline sucks major ass. What is happening at other schools?
I think someone mentioned this already, but this is just like Channel One in secondary schools. In exchange for paying for televisions in every classroom and a closed circuit network, schools have to agree to make the national Channel One newscast (and highly targeted commercials) part of the mandatory instructional day. The newscast actually wasn't that bad, but the Pepsi commericials and movie previews were completely mindless drivel.