Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Recently Friendster was blocked here in the campus computers. This was for the better part of a week. There was a note on the resulting page that said if the site was blocked by mistake, that an e-mail should be sent to the systems administrator.

I encouraged my co-teachers and students who complained about it to send in e-mails asking why it was blocked. Sure it's a growing phenomenon among the students, but it's not pornographic (the usual reason to block a website).

If they're going to block Friendster, they might as well ban all those messageboards the students have started to use to contact all their friends, since chat was also disabled on all campus computers.

It even made the student publications that the reason it was blocked was that a certain faculty requested that it be blocked. The Student Council intervened, and was told by the systems administrator to ask the faculty why he wanted Friendster blocked in the first place.

There were even posters around the campus from the Student Council asking students if they thought the blocking of Friendster was justified.

Word of mouth got around that the reason the faculty (of the College of Business and Economics, no less) asked for the site to be blocked was because his (or her) students were logging on to the site during his computer lab session.

Was it distracting them from the laboratory exercise he assigned? If so, he could just forbid the students from going to the site during his class. Don't punish the entire school for your students' indiscretions.

Was it because they weren't paying attention to his lecture anymore? In the first place, given a choice between listening to a lecture and using the computer in front of you to surf the net, what would anyone choose?

That's the reason I don't lecture in the computer lab anymore. The students are ultimately distracted. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but the best way for the students to make full use of their time during their lab sessions is to give them a computer exercise. If they want to surf on the side, that's their concern, as long as they submit the exercise at the end of the period.

And, consequently, they can't complain that they're not making full use of the laboratory fee they paid.

Other than those two instances when Friendster was blocked though, it has been accessible from the computers in the school since.

I don't know if the faculty concerned backed down, or the access has been allowed until the case is heard (which doesn't seem likely the way I see it). I guess I'll just have to wait until the next student publication to find out, because I'm not going on those messageboards (public as they are) to see the real scoop among the speculation.