Universities banning servers, harming education

My cow-orker Jason Schulz is at the DC EDUCAUSE conference, talking about the ways that universities can use computer networks to improve or detract form the educational experience. Some of the current higher-ed thinking is abysmal:

Penn State now has an absolute ban on any student running a server in a residential dorm. Period. The only possible exception is if you swear to only use it for "educational" purposes and get written permission from a faculty member and get approval from the Vice Provost.

So this is part of Penn State's solution to copyright infringement: Take away computing tools from students. As Ed Felten pointed out in our later panel discussion, this is a very dangerous approach for educational institutions to take. Computer science students often learn best through hands-on experimentation and tinkering with technology, and as Jamie Boyle noted in his plenary talk, unplanned experimentation often bears the biggest educational fruit. To paraphrase: "How many times do we learn more from the book next to the book we originally went to find on the shelf, or from the article after the article we looked up in the journal?" Hence, restricting access to content and technology out of fear for infringment can have a very real and direct impact on the ability of students to learn. [Note: Both Yahoo! and Google began as "unauthorized" Stanford student experiments with servers -- should those had been banned as well?]

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