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Illinois University Restricts Access To Social Media, Online Political Content
onproton writes Northern Illinois University recently began restricting student access to web pages that contain "illegal or unethical" content which, according to University policy, includes resources used for "political activities...and the organization or participation in meetings, rallies and demonstrations." A student raised concerns after attempting to access the Wikipedia page for Westboro Baptist Church, and receiving a filter message informing him that his access of this page would likely violate the University's Acceptable Use Policy, along with a warning that "all violations would be reviewed." This has lead to questions about whether some policies that restrict student access to information are in the best interest of the primary goal of education.
Perhaps it is because the university is more about indoctrination than education.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Supposedly the policy applies to employees not students.
An AUP governs the use of campus equipment and services.
I clicked the link and read the article, and there's gasping outrage about how they're "limiting free speech" by telling students they *also* can't use the campus computer systems for things like political messaging, meetings, rallies, or anything else - in other words, no, you can't spam the student body.
And for those of you who think that it's not right that they'd limit that sort of usage, think long and hard about this:
- Campus Christian Ministry decides to start spamming the entire campus with pro-life messages.
- Young Republicans club start spamming the entire campus with messages calling for the impeachment of Pres. Obama.
- ROTC program starts spamming the entire campus with messages encouraging students to sign up for military service.
Where's your unfettered free speech now?
exactly what is "illegal or unethical" about the content of the Wikipedia article on the Westboro Baptist Church?
If the entire student body doesn't shut down the school, or at least picket the office and generate some arrests, they should be horribly ashamed.
At the University of Virginia, the Board of Visitors fired the president in an unwarranted way. Student protest helped get her reinstated. If student action can do that, I'm pretty sure it can get such an absurd policy overturned. You just have to have the brains to recognize it, and the balls to pursue it.
Anyway, shame on the students if this is allowed to stand.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
According to one of the comments in TFA, https:/// worked fine, so they were only blocking HTTP. This leaves all the other suspects to their devices - the cornucopia of IM clients, VPN traffic, torrent traffic, usenet, diaspora/retroshare, in-game discussion via Steam or Second Life, IRC, etc. Sure, some of those are summarily blocked, but it seems they're doing such a poor job of acting in malice that I'd deem it sufficient to chalk the issue up to incompetence instead.
In the age of the internet, if you have to pay someone to sit you in a room and teach you like a trained monkey you have serious problems that go way beyond education.
I'll actually say that's quite wrong. At least it is for me anyways. I actually learned networking from the Cisco Network Academy at my local community college. The teachers there combined their literally decades of field experience with Cisco's curriculum, and I can honestly say just from that alone I probably know more than some of the people I've worked with in the past who themselves have been in their jobs for decades, and are where they are from learning it the way you describe...in fact some of the things I've seen some people do wrong are just downright scary from a security perspective.
Now if you want to make that argument about typical schools with high tuition rates, there's a ring of truth to it. I don't know why, but I often find that the more people spend on their education, the worse it is. There are outliers of course, but it tends to be the rule that if you paid a lot for your education, then you paid too much.