The general consensus among educators using technology is that IT are the enemies. Obviously this is a generalization but when you listen to teachers, read weblogs, this is a clear message.
Not for me. I’ve touched on this before and am currently working with our IT manager on a presentation at Tlt in a few weeks that deals with how we work together.
Today I was trying to access the chat portion in ustream. I had mentioned it casually with our IT staff and they said since it uses port 666 which is generally used for IRC, it could be potentially a threat. Makes sense. That’s their job, to protect and insure our network is stable and safe. But I persist. Since we all use Gtalk, it’s a quick IM conversation and here it is:
… Read the restme: how hard is it to open port 666? Is it like a click of a button or some weirdly involved coding? temporarily I mean
stinndler: i have to log into the firewall console
find the right access-list then add the exception to it
all so you can use IRC
me: It’s part of Ustream…lots of online presenters use it.
stinndler: how many is