On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Ringgold, Clint wrote:
It became an issue of should you use technology to fix a social or (you fill in the blank) issue and it was much easier to politely ask the teacher to police their class.
Perhaps it is my inherent laziness as a Unix admin, but I've always been opposed to using technology to enforce policy. I've seen "problem-solving" programmers write 10,000 lines of code to enforce something, when a simple "Don't Do That Or We'll Beat You with a Wet Noodle!!" would have been much more effective.
We've heard about the elaborate systems to control wireless in a particular room, at a certain time, for a select group of students, tying into student records, network equipment, backend LDAP and db servers, and the health center. When asked if something can be done technologically, the answer is always yes. The real question is not if we can do it, but *should* we do it.
Controlling the computers and the network is the easy part. Controlling the users is what makes our jobs interesting.
ray -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ray DeJean http://www.r-a-y.org Systems Engineer Southeastern Louisiana University IBM Certified Specialist AIX Administration, AIX Support =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
