I recently read an article on the slashdot blog entitled Internet Curfew for College Students?. The posting says that a top Indian engineering school, IIT Bombay, has started to restrict internet access to its students in the dorms. The new restrictions will prohibit students from having interent access at night. The reasoning behind this is because school officials beleive that the students are abusing the interent and it is hampering with their time for school work, extra curricular activities, and personality development. Another reason was that students hard drives were filled with bad content instead of good.
While I find it nice that the administration is taking measures that they feel are best for the students well-being and academics, I still find it a little extreme. I dont think that the internet is that responsible for low grades or decrease extra curriculars. If a student doesnt feel like doing work, and doesnt have internet access, he or she will just find something else to do. Watching television, or finding some way to get in trouble or goof off are a few examples.
More importantly, nighttime is when alot of students do studying of catch up on homework. I dont know how schools operate in India, but here alot of my classes post notes online, or involve using the interent to complete assignments or do research with. Not having the interent at night to do this would leave me less time to do it during the day. If I needed to use the interent during the day, it may force me to skipp classes or not be able to get a job.
Access to the internet isnt something that a person should be denied of. There are students that use it responsibly, and they should not have to suffer for others mistakes.
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2 comments:
Jessica, I completely agree with your comments here. On one hand I have to say that the internet can be distracting at times, especially when I do not feel like doing homework or studying. However, like you said, I NEED the internet to do most of my work. For instance, this BUAD477. Without the internet we could not do this entire blog/wikipedia project which is a huge part of the course. Overall, I feel that this idea of putting a curfew on the internet would only work if the teachers of that school did not incorporate the internet into their daily course work like ours do here at UD.
Yeah, Andrea, isnt it crazy that if we had these restrictions, a course like our Buad 477 class might not be possible. Since all of our projects are on the internet, doing them would be next to impossible.
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