I just submitted this to the IT Help Desk. I wanted to share it here to see if other folks have had a similar experience on various campuses. I want to make an even-keeled case for giving my LIS students access to another broswer on their student accounts – how did I do? What else could I say?
I am especially happy that the toolbar group in LIS768 wants to make a toolbar that will help our students with their coursework. I can’t wait to blog about that!
Hello!
I am following up on some requests from my GSLIS students in my LIS753 and LIS 768 classes. We’re wondering about getting access to the Firefox browser for student computers. I was told recently that Firefox is “not allowed” on campus computers. This lead to some lively discussion with my classes about security, access and opportunity in libraries. I promised my classes I would follow up with IT about this matter.
In LIS753, my beginning HTML coders want to compare and contrast how their web work looks in another browser. For the past few semesters we’ve been using my mac and other student laptops for this comparison. I was asked this semester why students cannot use another browser on their own accounts.
Some also asked about the campus edition of Firefox:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/08/29/firefox-campus-edition-download-for-students/
We’ll be in Parmer Hall for two more weekend classes. The next weekend is too soon — October 20 & 21 — but it would be most useful if my class could look at their work in multiple browsers in December.
In LIS768: Library 2.0 and Social Networking for Libraries, we are exploring 2.0 tools weekly. For group projects, we spent some time exploring various issues and technologies and I guided the students into self-selected groups. One group is going to create a Dom GSLIS Toolbar for Firefox. Toolbars are a growing innovation in many tech-savvy libraries. I was very happy the group decided to take this exploration on and give something back to the school. From their group wiki at http://gslistoolbar.pbwiki.com/ :
“The gslistoolbar wiki will help us plan and develop a Web browser toolbar for the Dominican University Graduate School of Library & Information Science. The toolbar will be designed to provide one-click access to GSLIS resources on both the dom.edu domain and the World Wide Web. The toolbar will also establish a persisitent Dominican/GSLIS presence on Web browsers both on and off campus. For our class presentation, we plan to demonstrate how to install and configure the GSLIS Toolbar on the Firefox browser. We’ll also show the class how we created the toolbar.”
I would really like for the class to be able to experiment with the toolbar on classroom computers. For example, we cannot experiment with the following library and Firefox innovations:
http://vielmetti.typepad.com/superpatron/2006/02/inserting_libra.html (Google Books Ann Arbor Library Lookup.)
http://libraries.mit.edu/help/lookup.html (MIT Library lookup)
http://www.mundell.org/2005/07/07/seattle-public-library-greasemonkey-script-part-2/ (Seattle Public Library & Timberland Greasemonkey scripts)
http://dream.sims.berkeley.edu/~ryanshaw/wordpress/amazon2melvyl/ (Mash up of Amazon and UC Berkeley Library catalog)
http://www.talis.com/tdn/greasemonkey/amazon-libraries (Talis, a UK library catalog developer & amazon)
As we move into a time where the browser is becoming the platform for such things as Google apps, image editing sites, and enhanced library catalogs– and more – I wonder if it might not be useful to offer access to multiple browsers on campus – and access to multiple new features. On a personal level, my course Web sites are all stored at WordPress.com this semester — the best editing browser for that site is Firefox. I use my MacBook Pro almost exclusively and use Firefox to edit the sites. Right now all of my students have blogs as well at WordPress. They use IE on campus and many use Firefox at home or bring their laptops to class to work around the student PCs.
http://l2course.wordpress.com/
If it’s not possible because of the difficulty of making Firefox work correctly in a networked environment, one solution my students discovered was loading Firefox on USB jumpdrives — see http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable We’d gladly explore this more. Please let me know if there are plans to offer Firefox in the future or if there are other work arounds we might explore.
M.
Michael Stephens, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Dominican University GSLIS