On November 30, 2000 Lab Management restricted web browsing on the iMac workstations in the Media Distribution Lab at 1101 Hart Hall. The change was made in an effort to ensure the original intent of the computers: for viewing multimedia based course materials. Clients using these computers will now be limited to viewing academic resources such as UC Davis class web pages and other educational (.edu) institution's web sites.The iMac workstations in the Media Distribution Lab are intended to facilitate the distribution of UC Davis class materials from the local file server and from course web pages. To ensure that students would have access to the materials that faculty placed on reserve on the Hart Hall File Server, Lab Management found it necessary to limit the web access on these workstations.
It was found that there was an abundance of misusage of the iMac workstations which left them inaccessible to students who needed to access their course materials. We observed repeatedly that students used these computers for non-school related activities such as checking personal non-class related email, participating in online auctions, or reviewing fantasy sports. Many efforts were made to inform clients of the academic purpose of the workstations, including signs and personally informing clients. However, in the majority of the cases the users still chose to ignore the policies.
There are 14 other Lab Management computing facilities (http://lm.ucdavis.edu/rooms ), with the only exception of 1154 Meyer Hall, have access to MS Office, internet, and email resources. We hope that our Open Access computing facilities at TB114, the MU Station, and Surge IV 301B/307 are sufficient to accommodate our client's general computing needs. These facilities offer 65 PC and 44 Mac computers.
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