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May 03, 2007, 04:05 PM ET
No Course Material Allowed on Student Site, Harvard Says
Like many of their classmates at Harvard University, Tom Hadfield and Benjamin Schwartz grew frustrated with the institution's Web portal -- a clearinghouse for weather reports, campus news, and course Web sites that The Harvard Crimson deemed "shoddy" and "clunky." So Mr. Hadfield and Mr. Schwartz designed CrimsonConnect, an alternative portal that promised to offer the same features in a more elegant format.
Sounds like a great example of student resourcefulness, right? Not necessarily, say Harvard officials. They took issue with CrimsonConnect's use of material from course Web pages, which typically require visitors to log on using campus ID numbers and passwords.
Harvard demanded that the course material be removed from the new Web portal, and Mr. Hadfield and Mr. Schwartz complied with the order. But now the Crimson is up in arms: The newspaper's editors say the university is trying to prop up its own "obsolete Internet monstrosity" by suppressing viable competitors like CrimsonConnect.
It's understandable that institutions like Harvard would want to keep certain online course materials behind fire walls. But as more and more student programmers develop Web portals of their own, colleges might have to find a way to work with those projects, not against them. --Brock Read
Categories: Gadgets, Student-Life
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