Why the secrecy?
March 25th, 2009 . by Daniel HölblingAlthough I am still actively working for Pixelpoint, running strong on finishing my projects, I also went back to Klagenfurt University to finally finish my computer science bachelor degree.
Only problem being that (since I am now caught up somewhere between work and university) I can’t fit any lectures into my schedule. I can barely attain courses that require me to do so, so lecture slides are a rather vital part of my studying right now, and not being able to access them is really a showstopper.
What really bothers me is that a university professor who is teaching computer science, doesn’t get the concept of an open exchange of information and knowledge!
All educational material for courses by the syssec group is accessible through an external website that is password protected and where username/password combination is only given out during lectures.
Why?
We are talking about slides for a university lecture, by Austrian law a public event that anyone can attain (yes! every person who wishes to can simply sit in there and listen). Anyone who wants to can simply walk into the ÖH office and can buy a printed copy of exactly those slides for less than 1€. Heck, everyone can get to those slides anyway so why are we keeping people out?
I’ve seen them, there are no state secrets in there. To be honest: I don’t even like these slides too much (they were meant to be presented by a professor mind you). Still they are a valuable source of information that I believe shouldn’t be kept away from anyone.
On the other hand there is O. Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Laszlo Böszörmenyi who manages to somehow have ALL of his course material be publicly (and freely) available to anyone. So, I doubt there is any legal reasoning behind locking away the course material and I demand that those password protections for the lecture slides are released. A university ought to be a place where knowledge is shared, so why stop at the boundary of a small institution like the University of Klagenfurt?
Weil das beim Horster immer so war, ganz einfach…
Gibt ja überhaupt erst seit ein paar Jahren Unterlagen. Da hat er sich (nachdem sich Studis aufgeregt haben) mit der ÖH gestritten weil er eben bis dahin keine Slides hatte, die Studenten aber gerne Unterlagen gehabt hätten.
Seitdem gibt es erst Slides… Vorher Handgekritzel in der VO am Overhead Projektor… Weil “wenn Sie das nicht gleichzeitig mitschreiben und verstehen können dann sind sie hier sowieso fehl am Platz” oder sowas, habs mir damals nicht aufgeschrieben.
Naja, kann man sehen wie man will. Fachlich top, keine Frage. Dafür halt anderswo… ähhh… kompliziert.
Was soll ich sagen? Ich arbeite in einer Firma/Brance, wo das Wegsperren von Daten das Geschäftsmodell ist. Wer hat schon Zugang zu unseren Archiven? Dabei ist alles schon bestmöglichst unter Volk gebracht worden
i think the problem is that slides are coming from a professor and they are bad.
many of our teachers refuse to give a away their slides, either because they fear that somebody will take the statements for granted, apply them and if something goes wrong, will claim vienna technical university publicly announced it, others don't wan't their data to be 'stolen', as slides are no official publication – if somebody publishes the content before, they will be accused of plagiarism when publishing their own research work.
but that does mean that the ones that fear the first, will publish some script declared as for studying purposes only, while the others will try to publish some paper/book/complete script and won't give you anything before they have it out.
anyway, in almost all of the cases, these scripts will have to be collected at university or if online, will only be accessible by students.
i think the problem of our universities is that they do research and teaching, while in other countries research and lecturing is often split up into different institutions. problem shall be understood only corresponding to the thematic of giving away information.
i anyway still don't see your problem. why don't get the password or the downloaded file from a colleague, or get the printed version? rather than complaining about this stuff, i would complain that there are no prepared test-questions+answers-files in ÖH database — we are learning for the exam not for life..
THanks for all your comments.
@wranner – agree
@peter
I strongly believe that such material should be openly published on the web. Nothing more nothing less. Those are no state secrets and most of those slides haven't changed for a long long time.
Also, if you look at Böszörmenyi, he manages to do research and still have his slides available. Just by releasing it to the web you create a piece of copyrighted material yourself, so I don't really see an issue. Also, having bad slides should be no excuse, but a reason to improve them.
If I have to call up a fellow student at 23:00 to get the username/password to start working on homework, something has gone totally wrong.
(That the ÖH is a rather useless institution in klagenfurt university is another topic I won't discuss here
, we'll try to fix that through the imagine-club)
Mark S. is definitely on the right track. If you want to get a professional looking email address, Id recommend buying your name domain name, like or
ajf 8
If its common it might be difficult to get, however, be creative and you can usually find something.
Mark S. is definitely on the right track. If you want to get a professional looking email address, Id recommend buying your name domain name, like or
ajf 3
If its common it might be difficult to get, however, be creative and you can usually find something.