May 3, 2007
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
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Well, I looked at both sites, and I don’t think the Crimson’s is really much better – in fact, graphically it’s pretty horrendous. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for Harvard to require authentication for access to their courses, but I also think we had better be prepared to support the export and remix of our materials, so I hope that they will work with the Crimson to support authentication via a mechanism like Shibboleth – it would be a very interesting experiment.
— Michael Berman May 4, 12:09 AM #
Though the article doesn’t say so, sounds to me like it might be a copyright issue they’re concerned with and not a user interface issue.
— Rob May 4, 07:54 AM #
Although copyright issues are in play, it seems more likely that the institution’s dislike of the renegade portal stems from marketing issues—specifically, branding and control. The Internet isn’t quite the wild frontier town that it once was, but student-led projects like CrimsonConnect can still strike a little fear in the hearts of marketing types who want everything neatly packaged and very manageable. Perhaps there is a bit of life in the revolution after all.
— Steve May 4, 09:42 AM #
Very interesting. I used to be a university webmaster and am keenly aware of the many pressures that go into creating university websites. There were times when I joked about creating my own renegade off-campus portal optimized for usability rather than PR.
On a slightly different topic but one still related to university IP disputes, readers might be interested in the current flap over the USC Film School’s requirement that students sign over their IP rights and the consequent ban on their sharing their work online. Some students have responded by asking that they be allowed to opt into a Creative Commons license instead. See:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/03/students_petition_us.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hNLtTWIxmM
— Prentiss Riddle May 4, 12:34 PM #