Thursday, August 30, 2001

U. of Virginia Turns to Parody to Warn Students About Misusing Computers By ANDREA L. FOSTER Grabbing college students' attention to warn them of the perils of misusing the college computer network is not easy. So administrators at the University of Virginia decided to try humor. Starting this summer, they have been showing new students a video -- created and produced at the university -- that parodies a 1999 Monster.com commercial, "When I grow up ... " The university's one-minute video features mock interviews with children earnestly describing all the computer rules they want to break when they "go to UVa." They speak above somber religious music. Although the praise is not universal, the video is getting accolades from within and outside the university, and the University of Dayton is now showing it to first-year students as well. "It's short, it makes a point, and students can relate to the sarcasm and parody," says Barbara Bell, coordinator for the office of computing activities at the University of Dayton. She finds it particularly effective that the computer violations become more egregious as the video progresses. In the last clip, a boy says that when he goes to the university, he wants "to hack into government computers and go to federal prison." Other children state that they want to share personal information with "faceless creeps" on the Web, send harassing e-mail messages, leave their e-mail open so others can read their messages, open e-mail attachments from strangers and get viruses, pirate music and post it on the Web, and spread obscene messages on the Internet. In addition to being available online, the video now runs regularly on the University of Virginia's cable channel. The university also is showing it to faculty and staff members for computer-security training. Steve Worona, director of policy and networking programs for Educause, a higher-education technology group, uses the video in his training seminars for college officials. "It will keep the attention of an inherently short-attention-span audience," he says. Not everyone likes the video, though. Rodney Meryweather, security and data-recovery manager at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, says the video insults people's intelligence and morals, and he calls it "demeaning and offensive." But most people who have seen it have enjoyed it. The video is the brainchild of Roxanne Chandler, a programmer analyst in the University of Virginia's department of information technology and communication. A fan of the Monster.com commercial, she had seen parodies of it elsewhere. She also knew that university administrators had considered using a video to educate students about copyright infringement in the wake of the Napster controversy. While she was watching yet another parody of the Monster.com commercial she realized that the university's tenets of computer use could be disseminated in the same format. "We floated the idea to the powers that be here, and we were off and running," says Ms. Chandler. She enlisted friends' children, ranging in age from 9 to 12, to act in the video. They are depicted in different scenes on the campus and in the surrounding neighborhoods of Charlottesville. The camera work and post-production editing were done by staff members from the university's School of Continuing Education, although the university hired an audio engineer to help with the soundtrack. The technology department's customer-communications and publishing division wrote the script. All told, the university spent about $4,000 to produce the video. The video is only part of the university's training for new users of its network. A handbook helps prepare new students for a quiz that they must pass before they are granted network access. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

Parents concerned about college drinking, AMA study finds Emory settles lawsuits with former professor who was ordered off the campus White students do better on LSAT than minority classmates with similar GPA's, report says Ex-student is accused of stabbing dean at CUNY's John Jay College U. of Toronto becomes the first in Canada to offer a minimum stipend to doctoral students American Political Science Association to honor 25 people U. of Virginia turns to parody to warn students about misusing computers An online course teaches students to read documents written in archaic scripts