When officials at Rock Valley College slapped a Web filter on the campus network last summer, they were hoping to keep students from clogging up public computers by playing online games, reworking their Facebook profiles, or surfing the Net for porn.
But Web filtering, as the college can now attest, is far from an exact science. While Rock Valley's Barracuda filter may have helped clean up campus machines, it has also kept professors and students from conducting some pretty basic — and harmless — research. Students in a course on abnormal psychology have struggled, somewhat predictably, to find information online about sexual disorders, reports the Rockford Register Star. More puzzlingly, students in the college's Model United Nations group have been blocked from viewing Web pages hosted by the real-life U.N.
Rock Valley has no plans to get rid of its Web filter, but it will try to make the service more flexible: IT officials will soon give professors passwords that will let them (and their students) temporarily pass through roadblocks. –Brock Read
