Issues with IT

Norwich Information Technology, located in the west wing of the science building, is open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. five days per week. It is a great resource for students, faculty, staff and anyone using the Norwich internet and/or having issues with a private computer.

The problem is that the office is only open five days per week: Not on weekends, not at night. If something were to go wrong on a weekend, there is nothing that will be done until Monday morning at 8 a.m. Sure students can call and leave a message if something goes wrong on Saturday morning, but chances are, from what we have heard, you won't hear back until Monday. 

Students have complained that when things go wrong and there is no one available to help, this causes problems for them when doing school work and assigned tasks.

We have also heard that there might be a privacy issues with how IT monitors student use of computers when they are hooked to the server. We have had reports saying that everything that you say, type, or view can and will be seen by the people in IT. This is a problem because a lot of students use the internet at school for private matters such as credit cards and banking.

We wonder if there are issues when personal information is visible to a group of people.

Look for a story on student privacy associated with school server use in an upcoming issue of the Guidon where we will have one of our Guidon editors go in depth with the IT staff and see what the story is with these issues.