What next, are you going to restrict your students from listening to music? Socializing with each other outside of class? Watching movies?
Why would I? Those are all extremely stupid ideas.
If your students have such restricted internet access in their campus housing than that's pretty much what you are doing.
di.fm is blocked. - No music.
myspace/facebook - no socializing
google video - plenty of historical and educational content, inaccesible.
If your students are not allowed to use the internet for entertainment does your school also expect students to have no life?
I too would like to know the name of your school.
I go to fullsail (fullsail.edu) where students really don't have a life because of 40hrs of classes per week, 3-hour lectures followed by 4-hour labs every day. Still, our internet access is not restricted by content. Some ports are blocked to prevent people from hogging up the wireless with torrents or online games while in class. Other than that you can go to any website. There is currently no campus housing but if there were, even port blocking would be unacceptable.
Sounds like you are not a very experienced admin if you are wasting so much time with the filters and playing moral police with your students (who are legally adults by the way). While plenty of bandwidth throttling solutions are available, more effective and don't require the same amount of maintenance to do the trick.
The whole bandwidth excuse is just a cop-out that's used to often hide a bigger issue.
What next, are you going to restrict your students from listening to music? Socializing with each other outside of class? Watching movies?
Since they can't already do this on the internet because it "interferes" with their learning, might as well restrict them in real life as well so that they totally have no life outside of class.;)
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di.fm is blocked. - No music.
myspace/facebook - no socializing
google video - plenty of historical and educational content, inaccesible.
If your students are not allowed to use the internet for entertainment does your school also expect students to have no life? I too would like to know the name of your school.
I go to fullsail (fullsail.edu) where students really don't have a life because of 40hrs of classes per week, 3-hour lectures followed by 4-hour labs every day. Still, our internet access is not restricted by content. Some ports are blocked to prevent people from hogging up the wireless with torrents or online games while in class. Other than that you can go to any website. There is currently no campus housing but if there were, even port blocking would be unacceptable.
Sounds like you are not a very experienced admin if you are wasting so much time with the filters and playing moral police with your students (who are legally adults by the way). While plenty of bandwidth throttling solutions are available, more effective and don't require the same amount of maintenance to do the trick. The whole bandwidth excuse is just a cop-out that's used to often hide a bigger issue. What next, are you going to restrict your students from listening to music? Socializing with each other outside of class? Watching movies? Since they can't already do this on the internet because it "interferes" with their learning, might as well restrict them in real life as well so that they totally have no life outside of class. ;)