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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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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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>'one only had to look at the hard drive of any of the students' computers to see that bad content dominated over good.'
It's a sad commentary about the Simpsons' effect on our culture - that I can only hear Apu's voice when I read this.
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I had 24/7/365 Net xs when I wuz in coll3g3!!! I turn3d 0ut ju5t f1ne!!! LOL!!!!
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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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Oh, so they're spying on the hard drives of their students now. Bad University! Bad! Have you been taking lessons from the RIAA?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
Except the big difference is the students at college are PAYING to be there and are not your children. They are supposed to be beyond nursemaid age, so stop treating them like babies.
If you want them to study more and improve their education, make the classes tougher and require more original work. Hell, raise the fees for Internet access, but cutting off late-night links is STUPID.
All it means is a few bright students are going to set up wireless links to off-campus DSL and charge a small fee for after-hours access. The problem wasn't solved, it was shifted by a few feet.
Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
$ du -hLs /home/daeg/porn /home/daeg/porn
/home/daeg/school /home/daeg/school
18G
$ du -hLs
29M
Ack! Quick, everyone symlink your porn directory into your school directory!
How about have been? For more than a decade? I'm not saying it was the factor in the school I chose, but the ethernet port per person in the dorm rooms sure made me a lot happier with my decision, and that was in 1996.
But realize that we are talking about college students -- adults, not children. Providing them with unlimited internet access is an excellent idea -- it ensures that the lazy slackers wash out of college.
For my sophomore year, I had a freshman roommate who used the campus internet to play WoW all night long. Literally -- I went to bed at 2 after finishing engineering homework, was up by 8, and he hadn't moved. Because of that he slept in all day, only to wake up later and play more WoW. Went to classes once a week at best. Guess who dropped out with a GPA below 2.0? Guess who wasn't ready for the real world, and wouldn't be able to hold a job for ten minutes with that approach to life?
An American high-school education is highly devalued from where it was years ago. Social promotions and strict rulesets are eliminating the gap that previously existed between the achieving students and the ones who would fail out. If you narrow that same gap in college, you end up doing the same thing -- churning out students who cannot manage time or priorities, students who stand no chance of surviving in the buisiness world.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Except most of my studying comes from online resources. Oh fuck, I don't have access to the JAVA API, shit I can't get to suns site now. I've got some work to do and I need to go look some stuff up in the crypto. To bad thanks to asshats like you I can't do that now. Shit?!? Something is wrong with my IDE. Oh fuck, I can't go get another copy because I can't get to Borlands site.
You pay for the access, you can do what ever the hell you want with it. I pay a technology fee which covers my access. I'm paying, I get to do what I want with it as long as I don't harm the universities network environment. I've read the contract very thoroughly.
You mad
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).
Life needs more saving throws.
Theres this thing called the interweb which is kinda integral to studying, my final year presentation is coming up and I want things perfect one of the best resources for my project is actually online (www.8052.com) so smart alecs like you kill my access at 10pm and suddenly when I hit a problem what do I do. Oh and BTW I'm currently working on this thing from 9am to 2am and have been for two weeks (project from hell, when something can go wrong it has) by your logic I'm a whiney uni boy instead of a nearly burnt out from working on this project student. My university provides free unlimited access but blocks ports associated with filesharing, this solution kills most online games and yet allows students to work from 9am to 2am.
Oh and the thing is college and university student are adults, if you treat them like children how are they going to cope in the real world? A university policy of asking students not to engage in illegal activites or do things which could be offensive to others (while detailing how said offended person should react) is more than enough, more than likely Bombay doesn't like its bandwidth bills and so it cutting back
Actually, after reading the article, I suspect that they are funded by the government (the boss there talks about wasting tax payers' money). If so, it would match up pretty well with their populist approach to education, which includes shaping the students into "well-rounded human beings".
What does one do during "late night browsing" that doesn't involve "touching the hard drive"? Eh?
"Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
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.
-Karthik
Now, if they filtered slashdot, I would spend way more time learning...
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
My university also doAÉ$~ß;$ß[;ädsl1pkrp$%£":L$K"P{J^NO CARRIER
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.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Just because there's porn on my HDDs than anything else, doesn't mean I spend all my time watching porn. It just means I have a large selection to choose from and wont tire easily from my collection. In the amount of hours in a week, I spend the majority of them at work and second to that would be resting.
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.
This is nothing new. I go to a college-prep boarding high school. Every night at midnight, our internet shuts off. An hour later, the computers themselves shutdown and won't turn on until 6:00 in the morning. You just get used to the fact that there is a limit to how late you can work.
Bravo!
... then they graduate with honors. Having completed their fixed task, they get to socialize, which INCLUDES Net access. If you have to work out a high-bandwidth fee, figure it out.
You pegged it perfectly. It's the GRADES that matter. If someone is bright and gets their work done,
As someone else pointed out, students were lazing about in drunken stupors in the days before net access. I don't care about how someone washes out. Self control is PART of the unstated education of college, where you don't need Bathroom Passes.
As a much larger issue, in the 21st century, Content Lockdown mentalities are OBSOLETE. Yes, this terrifies many Powers-That-Be. Deal. The Information Age is here forever, and it's only going to get MORE intense.
Universities are ridiculously expensive anyway. They can afford the loss-leader (excepting lawsuits) of a Net connection.
This is just another instance of PowerLust disguised as Think of the Children.
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I'm at IIT-Bombay student, so I can answer that. There haven't been enough computers in labs for *years*, and the authorities have only been sitting on their ass. The ones that are there are down as often as they're up, and many machines are underpowered. And one of our labs is not air-conditioned and gets blistering hot in the summer...
So we buy our own systems. And now they turn off network access at nights. Great going.
Most of us need all-night access before submissions, and to work on our projects, etc. Not to mention keeping in touch with people over chat. One of my friends who works on GNOME is really pissed because he chats in the night over IRC. Not to mention that IRC is blocked (he ssh-tunnels).
The network is absolutely essential for academics.
OTOH, most of us spend all our time in front of computers. I did. I've done little in the last two years off the computer. When I came here, I was very happy and thought that with my own computer and 24/7 network access, I'll do a lot of programming. But two years after that, I've done zero programming. Only wasted much of my time watching Star Trek, reading reddit, digg and slashdot... We're addicted and only now beginning to realize the problem. And same is the case for many, many students. I have to wonder -- if I'm complaining about not having network access for 9 hours in the night (11 to 8), something's wrong with me.
So they're hurting academics for, say, 2% of people who genuinely need access at night, while de-addicting a much larger number of people and improving our quality of life. Should the university do that? They're in a lose/lose situation. Turn off the network and they're accused of screwing with academics, or they'll be hundreds of students who have no life to speak of. Personally I'd treat students as adults and give them the freedom to do good work, realizing that most will only waste their time, but I can see why IIT-Bombay is doing this.