At Southampton we allowed personal pages right from the start ('94ish)
The positive reasons were that we felt using the web would be an important
skill, and an assett students could show to potential employees (I guess we
got that one right!). In addition, we knew we had a lot of talented students
with the time and enthusiasm to push the technology and experiment - we
certainly reaped some real benefit from student personal pages in the early
days. Less positive reasons were that we felt it would be extremely hard to
prevent students setting up pirate web servers if they wanted to (pre
firewall days!), so lets let them play where we could keep an eye on them.
Having carefully worked out the justification for student pages, it's
actually easier all round to allow staff to have them as well.
We have common sense guidelines,. vet pages before publication and require a
disclaimer. I'm not saying the odd problem page hasn't snuck through, but on
the whole allowing personnal pages has not caused any real problems and we
have accrued a number of benefits over the years. These days there is much
less demand for personal space as many people are using commercial ISPs
which can be easier to publish on than our service.
Cheers,
Colin
_____________________________________
Colin K. Work
Information Resources Manager
Southampton University Computing Services
Email: [log in to unmask]
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3090
Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 5657
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