Getting through the network

Another great post at Dipping a toe... I'm also finding that network security issues are having a bigger and bigger impact on course accessibility for the courses I develop - in fact, when students have problems with accessing the synchronous sessions at NYU, 9 times out of 10 it seems to be a problem related to a company security or a personal firewall setting.

There are so many options for firewall and proxy settings that it's nearly impossible to plan for all of them... And as this post points out, in a large organization you may be dealing with the biases and security fears of more than one IT department. (I tend to send my technical specs to each IT department involved in a company for approval of all file types and applications to be used during course analysis, but half the time they don't really read the specs before approving them, so you still end up troubleshooting these problems during pilot testing.)

The most annoying problem for me is the one mentioned in regard to .wav files - blocking file types out of the fear that employees might be using them for non-work activities ... as if it's the type of files available that causes employees to goof off!! Please.

Now that blogs are being called out in the popular press as time-wasters, I wonder how long it'll be before participants in my classes aren't able to access their class blogs from work?