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Comments: 149 +- Ask Slashdot: How To Help With a University ICT Strategy? on Monday July 27 2009, @02:12PM
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ScuttleMonkey
on Monday July 27 2009, @02:12PM
from the trying-not-to-screw-up-from-day-one dept.
from the trying-not-to-screw-up-from-day-one dept.
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An anonymous reader writes "I have been asked to contribute to my university's revised ICT (Information and Communication Technology) strategy and I am curious what fellow Slashdot members consider to be the main advice in this context. What are the major mistakes that organizations like universities make? Given the complexity of the different participants in a university, how does one have a coherent strategy that fulfills the needs of such a wide audience? How does one promote open source in a managerial culture? How does one deal with the curse of the virtual learning environment?"
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Submission: A University's ICT strategy by Anonymous Coward
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What are the mistakes that universities make? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, zero tolerance on those specifications (or, really, anything not otherwise illegal) would be a mistake since that would make the university non-interoperable with students, faculty, other researchers, industry, government, and the rest of the world. University IT departments (really, all IT departments) should have at least the purpose and goal of enabling the organization to meet its business objectives (efficient output of high quality teaching, research, advocacy, other products) through the effecti
Idealism blows when the rubber meets the road (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Serious breaches of public safety should be dealt with by security and/or the police. There's no sense in crippling technology that is necessary to the greater student body in order to make things difficult for a few stray pervs.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Why would it help tremendously?
How many incidents are we talking about here? I mean really. Are there THAT many people who go and jerk off in "out of the way spots" in the library? I mean, I could see it being a bit more in a university, mostly because of the number of teenage boys who are notorious risk takers but.... still. It just doesn't seem like something more than a small number of people would engage in.
Also, there are ways to get around technology. However, nothing stops crime like increasing the l
Re: (Score:2)
I wont disagee. Though, one or two cameras, and three or four fakes, would probably do a lot to discourage people.
There is often some amount of feeling that a University is part of the community that it is in. I worked at one where residents of the area surrounding the gym were allowed access to use the facilities. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Library do similar.
It would be a shame to see a few bad apples ruin it for everyone. Cameras ae fairly cheap, and allow these people to be caught by police, rat
Re: (Score:2)
How's about instead of relying on IT to handle of physical security, take all the computers in back corners and put them in central locations visible to the staff and public. Locking everything down won't prevent your pervs from shoulder surfing.
I'm suprised you haven't had a problem with people nicking the ram/mice/etc.
Re:Idealism blows when the rubber meets the road (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone is jerking off in public, call the cops. There are creeps and weirdos that come to any public place, ever been to a bus/train station? If someone is traumatized by seeing someone jerking off, they need counseling. Not for ther "trauma" of seeing someone jerking off, but because something so mundane made them feel "traumatized". It's gross, not traumatic. You call the cops, have the guy tossed out for indecent exposure, and move on with your life. Years of sexual abuse as a child? That's trauma. Being forcibly raped? That's trauma. Seeing a guy beat off in public? That's unpleasant. Your IT guy wisely realizes that not impeding the access of other, law abiding patrons of the library is more important then protecting some oversensitive co-ed's sensibilities. Briefly glimpsing a penis (I assume it would be brief, it's not like anyone is gonna hold them down and force them to look) is not the end of the world.
Personally, as long as they do it quietly and clean up after themselves, I would rather have guys jerking it in the corner then women at the next table over talking to their girlfriends about their periods and vaginal infections on their cellphone while I was studying. Yes, that has happened to me, more then once.
Furthermore, your admin is also helping prevent you from wasting university resources. Filtering systems DO NOT WORK. Keyword based systems block more legitimate content then illegitimate. Blacklist based systems block only a tiny fraction of sites, and anyone horny and frustrated enough to wank it in a library is going to keep looking until they find something, and will still cause plenty of false positives. A system that forces users to authenticate won't solve the problem because
A. The computers will hardly ever be used, because of the inconvenience, making them a waste of resources in the first place.
B. People will walk away and leave them logged in on a routine basis, making it easy for someone looking for an out of the way place to hop on and look at porn to jump on someones computer (assuming they don't just get their own account) and any evidence will be blamed to someone else.
C. It still requires someone to catch them "in the act", which is what this is all about preventing anyways.
Sounds like he's the pragmatist. He realizes trying to prevent people from looking at porn on library computers is an impossible task, and not worth the effort and inconvenience to the patrons. You are the idealist, with a lofty vision of a world where you can control everything, and people never accidentally see things they would rather not.
Parent
Re:Idealism blows when the rubber meets the road (Score:4, Insightful)
Filtering systems DO NOT WORK.
I'd argue that, in an academic environment, they do the opposite of work. Psychology, sociology, biology, anthropology, history, medicine, law, zoology, various arts, and I'm sure several other disciplines might need information that a filtration system would block. Free data access isn't just an idealistic vision, like the GP claims, it's important in a university setting.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
When I was in college there weren't computers in the library other than the electronic card catalog boxes, and it seemed like several times a month there would be an entry in the college news "crimes" section about someone being caught masturbating in the library. For some reason college age guys masturbate in libraries. I guess now they have something to look at.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I'm traumatized just thinking about touching the keyboard.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Why do you feel the need to point out that these were young, female co-eds? Does that make it worse somehow?
Yes, it called chivalry it may be mostly dead but not entirely. Among the heterosexual male population the desire to protect and shelter females is ingrained into the genetic code.
Because I'm a man, am I supposed to be LESS traumatized?
I damn well hope so. Fairy.
Drug use and selling? Theft of property? you're sure these were the SAME people that were masturbating?
It is certainly possible that these are to different groups and there are public mastrubators who are not selling drugs and druggies who are not publicly masturbating but I think the point is I don't want either in my library or on my network.
Let me guess, you vote Republican. Fucking scumbag. I wouldn't let your ilk in my library.
I missed it when the DNC endorsed public mastrubators or when
Re: (Score:2)
...I believe that you need the right tools for the job when moderating.
Especially when moderating from a publicly-usable university library computer with IE7.
and a really sticky, smelly keyboard...
Don't push it (Score:4, Insightful)
How does one promote open source in a managerial culture?
By using it only when it's the best solution. Don't push it if it's not the best tool for the job.
Ethical standpoints can be part of the criteria (Score:3, Insightful)
By using it only when it's the best solution. Don't push it if it's not the best tool for the job.
While that is very valid view to take - choosing the best tool for the job - I don't quite agree with it here. Or well, I do agree but I think that "open source" is a very valid criteria in choosing the best tool.
No, tools aren't automatically superior in security, features or such because they are open source. In fact, deciding to prefer open source harms this because it leaves some of the competition out.
Depending on your political views, how you view Universities in the society might vary. However, if yo
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Google (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
No need, (s)he's already outsourced the work to Slashdot!
Contribute how? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're being very vague. University IT policies have many many stakeholders (Provosts, Regents, President, Deans, department heads, just to name a few) and a lot of interdepartmental politicking needs to be taken into account. Is this a 30k+ student body with hundreds of staff in the IT department or is it student body of 1,000 with only 20 IT people? Is the IT department merged with the library system or is it independent? Does IT bill the other departments for services or do they operate with a predefined budget? Is the reason for getting your input to provide direction for overhauling the IT department's network and services, or is the goal to change the general technology culture of the staff and student body? Should IT be involved more directly with students or are they just a necessary service like janitorial and maintenance? Does IT set policies, or is that handed down by decree from on high? Is the head of IT respected at the same level as the dean of a specific school or is he fighting for attention? Do departments/schools manage their own IT resources does everything have to be centralized?
Perhaps if you were a bit more specific as to WHY the University is asking for your specific input, and WHAT kind of input they expect from you, /. readers could provide you with appropriate responses. The open/closed source debate should only be one tiny aspect of an overall IT strategy, especially in an organization with differing needs as complex as a university. For example, CS/CE departments will certainly need and want a lot of open source tools and systems, but Fine Arts is better left alone with OSX and Adobe CS.
As your question is phrased now, I think your respsonses are going to be mostly of the variety "use/avoid product X" or "push for open source" and not really of much help in providing specific input towards the strategy you are mentioning.
Politely ignore the faculty. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
with the end result looking like it was designed by a committee of monkeys
Get the students involved. At least the MIS-IT/CS students. That would be excellent real world experience.
Do the minimum, offer good advice (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Give us (research groups) the freedom to set things up so they work for us, but offer help in achieving that.
But most of all, don't lock it down unless you really need to.
You need at least two classes of service.
Extremely clearly written demarcation points agreed to by the highest levels in the organization. If you don't know what a demarc is, find an old (or young?) bell-head and ask them to explain the concept. On an experimental best effort basis, your department / research group / whatever does anything they want using equipment purchased and maintained by non-IT personnel. This ethernet jack and upstream is IT's responsibility and the cable you plug into it and downs
Beware of subsidizing one service with another (Score:2)
Get the budget balanced and as rational as you can: every year.
An example: It is not uncommon to see one part of an operation (e.g. phone lines) subsidize another (e.g. networking). There can be great reasons to do that kind of thing but it tends to bite eventually.
People may abandon the expensive service (especially in a tough economy) and come to expect the cheap subsidized service as a right (understandably). In this particular example the cheap networking can replace the expensive phone lines and sudden
Learn how to "manage" faculty (Score:3)
Figure out what their real needs are and meet them.
Learn who can be ignored and who can't.
In general, if they feel you are listening and understanding them,
you will get along ok.
IT strategy as a function of institution (Score:2)
Get Good Advice, then Act On It (Score:4, Insightful)
They ignored his suggestion, and installed whatever was good at the time despite his protests. I think they'll be due to re-trench a couple thousand yards in the not-too-distant future.
Need Real World Knowledge (Score:2)
Mistakes (Score:2)
In my experience, two big mistakes that university IT shops often make are:
Use Moodle instead of Blackboard or Desire2Learn (Score:4, Informative)
When it comes to VLS (Virtual Learning Systems) please don't give into the Blackboard marketing machine. Moodle [moodle.org] is free and equivalent in just about everyway. It drives me nuts to see colleges and universities paying for crap like Desire2Learn and Blackboard when many of them are cutting back student services and laying off people these days. What's even worse is that both Blackboard and D2L have significant bugs and really bad customer support.
Our university (around 38,000 students) pays Blackboard $600,000 a year (yes there are five zeros after that six). Please try convince your PHBs to give Moodle [moodle.org] a look. The community is massive and helpful. You can find hundreds of great pluggins as well.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm at a university that had WebCT, which then morphed into Blackboard and has just recently been replaced with Moodle. Having using those systems, both as a student and in teaching roles, I have to say that Moodle is just plain better. It's cheaper (TCO), more versatile and more usable. And much less prone to inducing rage :-)
Of course, that doesn't mean that it's invulnerable to screw-ups. If you lock it down from on high with One True Way of Using The System, then you're probably not going to suit the
Re: (Score:2)
This is what the suits call "sunk costs."
Interesting that 'the suits' use the phrase 'sunk costs' to justify a poor decision based on the sunk cost falacy [wikipedia.org]. The logical basis for decision making is to ignore sunk costs and consider only future costs and benefits. It may be that the transition cost outweighs the benefits of moving, but that would be an entirely different reason.
Develop custom software (Score:2)
Dynedain's "Contribute How?" post hit the mark, and I have no idea what it is you're really asking. However, having worked in university IT for about a decade I can offer some advice that can be applied broadly: you have an amazing resource at your disposal - smart people - and you should exploit that by developing software to suit your needs.
A lot of universities spend millions on proprietary software like PeopleSoft when they could get much better value and results by hiring competent programmers, work-s
Gmail and Skype (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Niggers! Spics! Kikes!
Snickers! Pies! Kites!
There, fixed that for ya.
Re: (Score:2)
It's simple: Relatively Unrestricted WiFi - (You can block off the obvious Battle.net and filter anything involving porn) and this allows any student with a laptop to research anything they want. Alot of kids today are getting laptops for the sake of college and university. Its almost a must.
Then you completely lockdown outter-access to anything within the physical domain of the Campus - being the plugs in the wall. Let them access their shared drives if they're in that kind of course - let them use the library printers, let them use outlook for email - (or your own campus built email). Other than that, they shouldn't need anything outside of the campus available to them on Campus computers.
This becomes maddening to enforce. EBSCO Host, wikipedia, and countless other research websites that reference other summaries on other websites. Heck, even a blog might have a key reference to a paper you are searching for.
A simple response of "Sorry. Internal use only." to a student is tantamount to a slap in the face for trusting their ISP(the school) to provide them the tools to do their work.
Another thing is this: A friend and I would have never gotten as far into programming if we couldn't have the oc
Re: (Score:2)
There is a pretty simple rule we use here:
Our policy is to prevent any user or device from interfering with other users on the network. Anything that does not interfere with use of the network by others is explicitly allowed.
It's pretty simple and very acceptable to everyone I've dealt with at work. However, it does give you an easy catch-all for dealing with asshats. Anybody that monopolizes the time of the IT staff or behaves in a way that incurs technical/legal issues/costs, can be considered to be in
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It's simple: Relatively Unrestricted WiFi - (You can block off the obvious Battle.net and filter anything involving porn) and this allows any student with a laptop to research anything they want. Alot of kids today are getting laptops for the sake of college and university. Its almost a must.
The moment you embark on the "block off the obvious ..." you've subverted the university network from a bastion of learning, to enforcing what YOU think students should learn. Would you like your university library refusing to carry banned books?
As an IT muckitymuck who makes policy, before you add any blocking that isn't strictly for technical issues (DOS, email virus filtering, spam filtering, QOS, etc) you better revisit your university's policy on censorship. If it's a state-sponsored institution, you
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only that, but remember about a year ago there was a /. article about a university course discussing strategy as played through Starcraft? Now you need to make exceptions for the rules.
Or my university had a multimedia programming/game development track within the CS department. You bet your ass they need unrestricted access to online resources that would otherwise be seen as non-academic.
The IT department cannot be responsible for determining what is or isn't academically relevant or else they'll end u
Re: (Score:2)
Filtering porn shouldn't really be the University's job, in my view. On their own machines, sure, but on private machines connected to the University network? Are they the thought police?
I'm lucky the College where I work isn't too restrictive. I was researching a paper on masculinity in modern film recently, and spent a while trawling for "gay barbarian porn" before it occurred to me that the IT guys might be wondering what the chick in Office 6/7 gets up to when she's working late...
Re: (Score:2)
Given the complexity of the different participants in a university, how does one have a coherent strategy that fulfills the needs of such a wide audience?
It's simple: Relatively Unrestricted WiFi - (You can block off the obvious Battle.net and filter anything involving porn) and this allows any student with a laptop to research anything they want. Alot of kids today are getting laptops for the sake of college and university. Its almost a must.
Then you completely lockdown outter-access to anything within the physical domain of the Campus - being the plugs in the wall. Let them access their shared drives if they're in that kind of course - let them use the library printers, let them use outlook for email - (or your own campus built email). Other than that, they shouldn't need anything outside of the campus available to them on Campus computers.
How does one promote open source in a managerial culture?
You tell them the benefits. How else do you promote Open source. (Rhetorical)
How does one deal with the curse of the virtual learning environment?"
Everything they NEED to use should be EASY to use. The things that most students use the University domain for are - Campus Library Book Tracking, Grades, and updates from teachers.
Thus if you can build those in-house and KISS, you won't have any problems. The LAST thing you need is a seperate piece of software that doesn't work fully with your current system. If a student has to remember more than one username or password - its not a good system.
While blocking Battle.Net may seem like a given - it may actually interfere with what students need to do. I had a "Culture of the Internet" class in college, and one of the papers we had to write was about joining and participating in an MMO (you could use any MMO, free or pay to play) and actively playing the game for at least an hour a week was part of the coursework.
As a publicly funded university, I'd say if you're doing anything more than verifying the person is a student (at my college, after joini
Re: (Score:2)
At my University we have that completely backwards. There is Wifi access everywhere, that gives you access to both the internal domain and the general internet. There is minimal blocking, notably the only outbound block is the default IRC port, although inbound ports for well known services (HTTP, FTP, etc) are generally blocked . No content filters in place at all. There are two VPN's available for remote access to compus resources. The Cisco VPN is restricted to faculty use, but the Microsoft VPN servers
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Yes. That is exactly what my university does for the wired network. For the wireless network PEAP is used to authenticate users (although the other page must also be filled out, because each machine is given a domain name (subdomain of a subdomain of the University domain name).
In fact I do not believe there is any limit to the number of devices per user either.
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I think that it isn't just better software, FOSS is a better solution for large organizations because they can make custom "in-house" changes, as they like, whenever they like. Changes can mean feature updates or interlinking with other services on campus, security customizations, etc, for which the large organization doesn't have to remain tied to software manufacturers or
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, the "meet them" part is the part where supposed "agendae" may fall. I believe the OP was asking how to gracefully meet the needs of the school while aligning himself with what he sees to be the ethics of his field, while at the same time dealing with other managers who are in equal-ish positions of decision (for instance on a committee) but possibly of opposite opinions regarding what constitutes a balance of ethics,
Re: (Score:2)
I haven't stepped foot in a university in a decade.
I've been out in the real world. I spent a while in IT and had my 'idealistic' streak like most of the people in this thread, including, likely, the submitter.
However, since then, I've spent most of my time outside IT (though still closely related, I work in a software company). I've come to see the other side in the business world. IT, in the terms of infrastructure per the questions posed, is a cost point, not a profit center. I used to be the rabid L
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Nonsense: there's a huge difference between promoting the public interest (OSS), versus the interests of a particular corporation or individual — especially when you are working for an organisation whose mission is to advance the public interest (academic/charitable/public sector). One is a virtue, the other is verging on corruption.
Granted it would be a mistake to elevate this above the task of actually getting the job done, but I see no shame in promoting OSS as a matter of policy provided there ar
Re: (Score:2)
Usually it's something in the sense of: the college has purchased some tools that were promised to work but except of giving the managers nice pie-graphs (what they call dashboards) are a pain to actually implement, program AND use on the other end (HEAT, Peoplesoft, SharePoint, SAP) and require years of fine tuning to perfect.
There are plenty of good open and closed source products that do either all or parts of the work that each of those packages do and they usually integrate really well with each other
Re: (Score:2)
Yea... OS X full OS
Windows Vista... Full OS
A Linux Kernel... Just part of the OS
Perhaps you should take a look a work desktop with Linux on it. Graphical Artifacts everywhere that or have it randomly lockup on me. Most Linux Distributions who focus on Desktops would be ecstatic if they could get Linux to run as well as OS X 10.1 or Vista. Don't fool yourself Linux has problems a LOT of problems. If you get the perfect system and check every stupid hardware spec then you probably get a nice running Linux