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Internet Curfew for College Students?
140Mandak262Jamuna writes "IIT Bombay, one of the top Indian engineering schools, is restricting internet access to its students. The restriction is simply to cut off all internet access at night from the dorms. The school claims the 24/7/365 internet access is hampering academic performance, personality development and extra curricular activities. Though these are the 'official' reasons, it appears there are other reasons too. Mr Prakash Gopalan, the Dean of Student Affairs, says, 'one only had to look at the hard drive of any of the students' computers to see that bad content dominated over good.'"
Now in addition to tuition, sports, and *gasp* quality of education, students will select schools based on Internet availability.
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Eh? What about those of us whose extracurricular activities depend on the Internet? And those of us who colleges offer courses online? Those of us who take classes in the evening, and catch up with our social lives afterward?
Glad I don't live in a dorm.
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That's because bad content is correlated with very large file sizes. Seriously, how long will this last?
So now they download their pr0n during the day instead of at night. Instead of engaging in wholesome activities like playing CS:Source, they will go out drinking and fornicating. College students are going to find ways to be lazy no matter what you do. Just because you can track Internet usage and can't track the other stuff doesn't mean the solution is to cut off the Internet. You are just punishing people who could be using it to further their education.
In any case, I feel sorry for them because clearly they have stupid people in charge. But, on the plus side, they get some real world experience dealing with stupid people making decisions they have no say in.
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If you can't handle college without having the administration trying to force you to work, you aren't going to be able to handle a job. Your boss isn't going to hold your hand. Letting the people spend time on the internet instead of studying weeds out the lazy and promotes the hard working. If you aren't going to make it in your field, it is best you find out quickly, instead of after years of wasted money on college.
I have heard time and time again about Indian education (specifically Computer Science) failing to adequately prepare students for real life. This seems like another example of that.
College students are masters of getting what they want despite rules and regulations. Some enterprising group of CS students will go around caching web sites or host forums off of their computers (or the CS lab computers) and the word will get out about where folks can go to be "on the internet" between dusk and dawn.
Of course, there's always game systems, iPods, and off-campus wireless networks for people to use.
The best thing to do would be to raise the requirements for classes, thus forcing people to have to study more, and require participation in an extra-curricular activity as a requirement for graduation. Or you could just realize that socialization patterns are changing and deal with it.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Sounds like some bad snooping going on there.
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Heheh...me too...something like "Thank You! Surf again...."
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The primary purpose of attending university is to get an education, not 24/7 Internet access. I can and do restrict online access of the children at home. My house, my rules. The fact that some spoiled brats are whining about it just affirms the reasonableness of the rule. If you're going to pull an all night session it should be studying not gaming or web surfing.
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All the jokes aside, while it is reasonable for *you* to restrict the activities of *your* children in *your* home, it is NOT okay to limit the activities of college students. Sure, they are there to get an education but what is this teaching them? That censorship is ok or even good?
Morality, social behavior, and personal habits are not modified in good ways by censorship or other controlling means. It might work right now for your children, but these are not children, they are college students - young adults whose main occupation is passing tests right now. While it's a bad analogy, most people who do prison time don't come out better than they went in.
If you think about it, you can't force someone to learn. You can force them to attend classes but you can't force them to learn. If they are going to fail, let them fail in school rather than as a developer in your new outsourced project!
What exactly is 'bad content' in this situation? If IIT owns the hardware the students are using then they have a say in how it is used. If they don't own it the situation is reversed. It's an assumption here, but I believe that net access is paid for with tuition? If the restriction is part of the school rules, then paying tuition is more or less like accepting those rules, but if the situation is just one of censorship it will come to a bad end. I'm also going to assume that students were not told of the restriction when they paid tuition.
If this were applied to life, restrictions on network and phone network access would be considered a very bad thing. (my apologies to rural communities that still have trouble getting network access) I really don't think this is the kind of lesson that students need to be taught.
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The problem there is that you expect them to be sane and logical about it. If they actually wanted to block "bad content", there would have been lots of other possibilities, like just blocking the porn sites at the proxy. Most companies do that.
In reality it's a knee jerk "think of the children!" (well, ok, the students) solution, based on little more than some "back in my day we didn't have these newfangled computers and everything was soo much better" nostalgia.
Logical? It doesn't even actually solve even the problem of "bad content", as there's still nothing to prevent one from downloading that earlier. It's not even based on any kind of study showing that the decline in grades is actually any different between a group which had its internet connection removed, compared to a control study who didn't. Is it actually based on the Internet, or maybe it's just that as the "me wanna be a rich computer guy too" explosion hit India, and the explosion of universities offering quick IT training, now enrollment isn't exactly limited to the top smartest and/or most passionate people any more? They don't know, but they're implementing a solution based on wild assumptions anyway.
It's just the same kind of nostalgia-tinted goggles, and/or fear of the new, that you can actually see all over the world. "Aaauuugh! Kids these days are into X, that will be the fall of civilization as we know it! We didn't have X back in our days, and look how much better everything was back then!" Where X even in the USA included at various points: comics, rock-and-roll music, tabletop games, computer games, etc, etc, etc. At every single bloody step there was some new uber-threat that would destroy civilization as a whole... except that always failed to actually happen, or indeed make any noticeable difference. In India's case X is simply "using the Internet", but otherwise the scare is exactly the same.
The problem with such nostalgia-based reactions is that nostalgia always presents stuff through rose-coloured glasses. We don't remember what it really was like X decades ago, we remember some idealized, sanitized version where everything was happier, the grass was greener, the sky was clearer, all students were the very incarnation of virtue and non-stop study, and the neighbours were all one big happy family. It never was like that, we just filtered out the bad parts, or re-painted them in a bright rose colour.
Hence any reaction or measure based on that kind of inherently bullshit invented "data", ends up nothing more than a case of GIGO. (Garbage In, Garbage Out.)
Worse yet, wasting time and energy on such bullshit measures just serves to divert time, energy and attention from the _real_ problems and causes. E.g., these guys instead of actually spending some time figuring out what the real problems are, just did a feel-good bullshit measure and can rest for the next few years until it becomes obvious that it didn't work. In the meantime, _if_ there is an actual problem at work there, it can continue to have the same effect or even worsen.
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Several years ago I had a (relatively short) spat of addiction to Neverwinter Nights. During a random conversation with my online mates one night, I was rather shocked to discover that most of them were in college. I myself had graduated college several years ago and had solid high-salary job. My Neverwinter hobby/addiction was just a brief fascination --- something to do in between girlfriends.
There is so much studying and socializing to do while in college, I honestly can't imagine playing any online game during college. That is why I was shocked --- I was like, what the FUCK are you doing playing Neverwinter Nights? We had been playing around 4 hours a day. College is a key time to improve oneself, and they had been squandering that time. While I was squandering my own time as well, the difference was that the impact on my life was one hell of a lot less (negligible, in fact).
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A. You can not stop students from "bad" content. The internet isn't the ONLY source of all this. You can't really stop people from going outside IITB, and you wouldn't want to ransack every visitor at the gate.
B. I am not sure if the argument is against copyrighted content, but otherwise, I definitely believe that students must be given the freedom to watch what they have and what they want. And doing this ransacking business makes the university look terribly cheap. The students should at least get together and sue, i'd say!
C. Having tight firewalls and proxies is a great way to limit access to the internet. But refer to point A.
D. A lot of institutions have lately come up with sandboxing students' interests in the excuse of increasing productivity (if by that you mean jail time or slave labor, sure). It has the risk of making students go mad in line with notorious university schedules. And a lot of students are definitely not into sports nor into geek entertainment, if you're making a point about friendlier alternatives. It just doesn't work.
E. For those who would want to get deep into religious beliefs, hinduism couldn't care less if your child did the "wrong" thing at the right time. It does go against foolish, ignorant and orthodox people who can't reason why they do what they do. And by suppressing your child more, you'll only force him/her into rebellion, causing more damage than otherwise. F. The only real way to stop it all is if students by themselves learn to regulate their lives. It is not going to work by suppressing them. It actually works the other way round.
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I don't think I would attend a school that tried to restrict my internet access or had a poor infrastructure. If I'm going to school, and paying a fortune to attend, I expect to have access to every tool I might need any time I might need it (barring physical limitations).
By the time you reach college you should be self sufficient enough to manage your own affairs. If your not, you deserve what you get (fail/get pregnant/have a kid/get arrested/etc). It's not the schools place to babysit the students at this level.
Mr Prakash Gopalan, the Dean of Student Affairs, says, 'one only had to look at the hard drive of any of the students' computers to see that bad content dominated over good.'
Bad by what definition? And who sets that standard? The Dean of Student Affairs deciding what's good and bad on the internet is a little like my pharmacist letting their conscience decide which meds are good and bad.
Both of those are bad ideas. Far more dangerous than any content on a college kid's hard drive.
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Consider the number of college students that go out and "booze it up, etc, etc", perhaps rather than doing this, they're spending some time online playing a game. It doesn't necessarily mean that they are neglecting their studies, but rather that they are taking some time here and there to wind down and enjoy a nice game.
I tended to do the full-burn thing early-on, finish my assignments, and then kick back for a game of Quake 2/3 or various others when I was in college. It was a great way to relieve stress after busting my brain on code for several days/hours, and slightly more healthy than drinking my face off like many did.
I managed to get through college playing online games hours a day and became quite a pot head junior and senior year while starting to go out and party a lot from sophomore year on. Held a job for 20 hours a week goofing off at Best Buy to help pay my rent, got a double major in Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering in 4.5 years by going to class MAYBE 1/3 of the time. To top it off, I have a very nice job for an large company. I had a lot of fun and got those bad habits out of me and now believe I'm a better person while I had a hell of a time. Do what you want to do, just know when you're backed up against the wall and really need to do something.
The point is, I don't think cutting internet is going to do jack except piss students off at the administration. If I were a student there, I'd find a little startup money with friends and build a small wireless ISP off campus that reaches onto campus and sell bandwidth for a small price.