The What and the Who of VPD

Re: The What and the Who of VPD

by parker owens -
Number of replies: 0
I'm a tech person and I regularly READ scope, but don't have time to craft responses. I get a lot out of it and I thank you.

I am in the 'IT Dept', so I thought I'd throw my 2 cents in. There are often reasons why the IT dept puts the kibosh on various technology. For instance, some blogs and wikis are not accessible, and if a faculty requires their use, it opens up the university to getting sued. This is something faculty rarely consider. In another case, Second Life was considered, but in the end we could not support it. Second Life issues updates almost weekly, and there is no way we could configure a lab to make this work out. Now, you could leave it to the individual students to download the software each time, but the rights they are given may or may not let the application be installed. If they have problems, who will they call? IT, and we don't have the staff to support it. Additionally, Second Life requires extra hardware, microphones and video cards, etc. And then there is faculty training...

So I just wanted to poke my head in here and say that we are not trying to ruin your attempts at using cutting edge technology, there are reasons why it won't work sometimes. If you really want to use something, there is no reason why you can't, just know that if the official policy is that you can't use it in your class, and you do, you could be sued.