Description: Bob Brown, Southern Polytechnic State University
W ho'd have thought I would need a personal web site, especially since I already have one for my house ? Turns out I do. I've used the web server at Southern Polytechnic State University* for material relating to teaching and learning since the university first had a web server. According to the Wayback Machine , that's been since summer of 1999. (I think it goes back farther than that, but I don't have any evidence.) I built up a small collection of reference material relating to computing that got indexed
Then, in August, 2011, the people who run the SPSU web site apparently decided that teaching and learning would take a back seat to other uses of the web. They moved all the faculty material to a different server, with no notice, four days before the start of fall classes. All the search engine links broke, which was bad. Even worse, all the links in my distance learning courses broke, and all the links my students had already bookmarked broke. All that breakage could have been avoided by installing some "r
In spring, 2012, we got word that faculty must move their web "stuff" to a server named "educate.spsu.edu." What kind of a name is "educate" for a web server? It's a verb , for goodness' sake! Why weren't faculty consulted about this? Anyway, most of us moved at least some stuff; I moved as little as possible. That turned out to be a good thing because the people who run the web server scheduled something like twelve hours of downtime during the last full week of spring classes, with three hours' notice. {s