Anthony Hook

This post was inspired by my good friend, Kyle.  The University of Wisconsin – Superior has a technology survey open for the use of “Strategic Planning.”  The survey is open to students, faculty, staff, and other.  I decided, much to your surprise, I’m sure, to speak my mind about technologies.  I feel that if they are open to hear what people have to say, especially the people using the network and technologies, it is probably a good time to voice my opinions.

My role at UW-S is. . .

Student

And I am. . .

Full-Time

When it comes to support for Technology (Hardware, Software, Classrooms, Labs, Web, E-mail, and Telephones) at UW-S, what I would like to see is. . .

The use of more Open Source technologies.  These technologies could help reduce the operating cost, reduce overhead, improve security, and speed up operations.  There exist solutions for the email systems that don’t cripple a web-based session if anything except Internet Explorer is used, and aren’t biased to Windows only operating systems and their proprietary software.

A technology that needs to be explored at UW-S is. . .

As stated in the first open-ended question, I think Open Source technologies should be explored.  There are many alternatives to the currently-used systems that could reduce cost (licensing, for example), reduce/negate the need for antivirus technologies required to be on every Windows computer, provide a safer, faster network, among other things.

What interrupts my day and/or what I need to be aware of in advance is. . .

The network reliability often interrupts my day.  Connectivity, both wired and wireless, is often laggy, non-responsive, and disruptive of normal work.  I often have connectivity being timed out, leaving me ‘connected’ to the UWS network without being able to reach anywhere outside the internal network (uwsuper.edu, exchange email, etc).

If I was “Chief Information Officer for the day”, the one thing I would do is. . .

A lack of packet-filtering.  This is a source of the network bottleneck that has been experienced this Fall with the numbers of students that UWS has taken in.  I believe the University should grow its technologies with its amount of students without limiting online productivity.  The current packet filtering technology has limits to how much it can handle at a given time, and this is obviously causing disruptions.  Perhaps take a look at the type of traffic that is being filtered and re-analyze the reasons at filtering it.

One example of this is torrenting technology.  Torrenting, as a technology, is an excellent technological advance to distribute information without putting a load on a single source.  This has become a popular way to distribute – let me emphasize – *LEGAL* media, open source software, and other types of collaborative stuffs.  Things like music that independent artists want to share without having to buy web-space and traffic online, but would still like to be heard, Linux distributions, and open source software are just a few examples.

Yes, of course, it can be used in civilly illegal ways such as downloading pirated software, music, etc, but the reality is that it is an excellent way to share, collaborate, and distribute many types of legal media and information.  Relating this to something such as the auto industry would be to ban a certain type of car from the road because it is known to be used by people for dealing drugs.

I believe the purpose of network providers is to simply provide the ‘pipes’ for network communictation.  I don’t believe they should have the right to be traffic police over what is transmitted over the wires (limiting torrenting is an example).  I do, however, support the idea of giving certain types of traffic priority.  An example of this would be time-sensitive communications such as voice and video.

What you do well (or not so well) in Technology Services is. . .

…the ability to listen to other opinions, gather more information, and make decisions based on that.  The fact that this survey exists is an excellent thing, and I hope these ideas presented by the student body/faculty/staff is considered in decision making in the future.