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.'"

Comments

One more college differentiator

[davidwr]

Now in addition to tuition, sports, and *gasp* quality of education, students will select schools based on Internet availability.

Internet access is integral to education...

[Short Circuit]

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.

Re:Internet access is integral to education...

[westlake]

These people act like they've never heard of an all-nighter before.

or maybe after seeing the end product of an all-nighter they want to put an end to it.

Re:Internet access is integral to education...

[lucabrasi999]

So how is writing papers with no or severely limited research materials going for you?

Just where in the article did it say the students couldn't do their work in the library?

Re:Internet access is integral to education...

[markov_chain]

Without access in dorms, you would just get your lazy bum ass to a lab and do your paper writing there. The awesome social side benefit of this is bonding with other people in the same situation. Only the motivated ones would be in the lab anyway, so this is a great opportunity to create a high quality network.

Re:Internet access is integral to education...

[lucabrasi999]

but if I had to trek to the campus library every time I needed to cite a reference

...you would have been doing the same thing as Albert Einstein. Or Copernicus. Or Plato.

Squishie

[Stanistani]

>'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.

Re:Squishie

[cayenne8]

First thing I wondered is...what the HELL is that administrator doing looking at students' harddrives??

Sounds like some bad snooping going on there.

"It's a sad commentary about the Simpsons' effect on our culture - that I can only hear Apu's voice when I read this."

Heheh...me too...something like "Thank You! Surf again...."

Personality development

[morgan_greywolf]

I had 24/7/365 Net xs when I wuz in coll3g3!!! I turn3d 0ut ju5t f1ne!!! LOL!!!!

Uhhh

[brkello]

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.

Re:Uhhh

[Hoi Polloi]

It'll just pose a challenge to their CS and EE students. Just wait until they start rigging up wireless links to outside connections. I welcome our new Indian hackers.

Poor Preparation For Life Experience

[endianx]

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.

Re:Poor Preparation For Life Experience

[lucabrasi999]

The point is they are trying to take away a source of entertainment so that the students will engage in more productive activities. The problem is that once they are out of school, the banned sources of entertainment will again become available, and the student will not have learned any self control.

Did you read the article from top to bottom? As I posted in this same discussion, MOST of the university campuses in India do not offer hostel (dorm-room) internet access 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In fact, IIT-Madras pulled the access away from the dorms one year ago.

Part of the problem in dorm life is that you put up with the university's rules. If you don't like the rules, move out of the dorm or change to another university.

Take someone that attends a US Military College like West Point. They put up with rules like early morning revile and exercise. But, they receive one of the best educations in the world (of course, as soon as they leave West Point, they are headed to Iraq--but that is another discussion thread).

If you are reading this and you are a student at IIT-Bombay (Mumbai) that happens to disagree with your school's new policy, then you have three choices:

1) Do all of you late-night studying in the library.

2) Move out of your student dormitory.

3) or change schools.

There. Problem solved. And, stop wasting your energies on slashdot submissions.

Re:Poor Preparation For Life Experience

[Bastard of Subhumani]

Why wouldn't they just get off of their lazy asses and head to the library?

A wild guess here - because even in India, it's not generally considered good form to wank in the libtrary?

Won't Work

[Paulrothrock]

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.

Solution

[daeg]

$ du -hLs /home/daeg/porn
18G /home/daeg/porn

$ du -hLs /home/daeg/school
29M /home/daeg/school

Ack! Quick, everyone symlink your porn directory into your school directory!

Re:Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when I was at IIT how students used to burn p0rn CDs and write 'RedHat Linux 7.2' on it. Others (esp. non-CS students) scared of Linux usability never used to lay their hands on them.

Re:Seems reasonable to me.

[OwenMarshall]

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.

Re:Seems reasonable to me.

[Broken scope]

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.

Small problem with the quote, so I fixed it

[Grashnak]

"IIT Bombay, one of the top Indian engineering schools, is restricting beer access to its students. The restriction is simply to cut off all access to beer at night from the dorms. The school claims the 24/7/365 beer access is hampering academic performance, personality development and extra curricular activities. There, now it resembles MY college reality.

Same..

[CasperIV]

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.

Re:Same..

[morcego]

You don't think college students should be self-sufficient enough to manage their own affairs? I'll agree that most of them probably aren't (and I'll admit there are things I could have managed better when I was a student), but they're adults, they really ought to be.

Well, "should" really doesn't many any difference, does it ? As far as I'm concerned, they should be at 12.

If not, perhaps we ought to raise the legal age of adulthood and make sure all these kids have guardians until they graduate?

Most are not "adult" enough to manage their own affairs by the time they graduate, either.

Then again, unless at some point they do start trying to do it (and fail), they will never learn. Managing one own life is something you only learn from experience (making mistakes), as far as I'm concerned.

The main difference is between supervision and "control". The Internet Curfew is not supervision or education, it is control. The only thing resulting from this is people how are even less capable or managing their own affairs. So, IN THIS PARTICULAR case:

Supervision = good
Control = bad

Re: Time Management

[TaoPhoenix]

Bravo!

You pegged it perfectly. It's the GRADES that matter. If someone is bright and gets their work done, ... 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.

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.