pcstru

It is true to some (quite a large) extent, but I'd ask her if that what is what peoples job descriptions say. Does the JD's for the DH capture the delegation of responsibility and accountability for functions which would be a conflict of interest? If they do, can she really expect someone to make recommendations to her that are clear of conflict. It has to make her job difficult if she is always having to assure herself that the DH is championing the correct action or not presenting a fair picture by omission of fact because of that conflict. IMO a DH could do it, but they should not also have responsibility/accountability for data processing. However, in a small school that might be difficult. Even in a large school, it might be difficult to disentangle all sources of conflict. Sometimes, pragmatism it is going to dictate that it has to be a case of what is least worst.

Not SIMS but we have one photo (per person) to rule them all. Finance. They own the process that produces cards.

It is not entirely clear from the press release but it is likely not quite as simple as just sending email to a private address; the implication is he did it with the intent to use that data in another enterprise where processing of the data would be performed for his own purposes. It is common behaviour for sales people to take customer contact lists with them - every had a call from your friendly account manager only to find they have started working for a new company? They were quite likely committing a criminal offence to do that. As a slight aside, many people don't realise that with a subject access request under DPA, not only are you entitled to know what data a company holds about you, you are entitled to know how/where they got hold of that data. Yep.

I was (hopefully politely) trying to expand to a more general context, but I'm happy to argue it within the context of a school on the premiss that we are talking about reasonably well behaved code. I do sort of agree. What is problematic is quite why. The fact is, we don't know what code is running on our browsers in the main. In the end, whatever it is, it is numbers being manipulated by code. Compared to what? I asked a couple of questions which compared unsolicited advertising and the processing involved in that, to mining tulips. The point of those questions was, it might be exactly the same expenditure. Are you measuring the impact of advertising and tracking code? Do you know what they are doing with device fingerprinting and behavioural tracking scripts? Why is drawing abstract mathematical pictures of tulips a problem and compared to that? When a student or teacher visits a site, if they get from that what they want and that content is not forbidden and the delivery neither impacts their experience or the experience of anyone else - why exactly does it matter? I'd say what we have to do is allow students to make use of the web. Do we get to choose that adverts and behavioural tracking code is preferable to rolling some dice to award token 'tulip' prizes. To me that seems a bizarre distinction (assuming reasonably well behaved code). IMO this will be a thing. You will have EduGCoin, fractions will be awarded to you personally for every moment your browser spends on the site. Blockchain is a way to certify genuine user appfacetime to marketing snouts. The tulips will bloom. What a time to be alive!

My Job Description does not explicitly say I will write Policy, either named ones or generally. It does explicitly say I will follow policy and that I am responsible for ensuring departments I manage, follow them. There is stuff about leadership, strategy and contributing to that, that to me make it quite reasonable to think that writing the occasional policy is in scope. It is not like I am being asked to clean toilets (to pick something hopefully everyone might agree is out of scope!) Do I get the pay to go with it? Well ... now ... that is a hugely difficult question. They obviously pay me enough that I've stuck around. I've mostly hugely enjoyed my time working in a School. I like that our end product is not just abstract profit, it is changing the rest of peoples lives - hopefully for the better. I don't believe our education system is anywhere close to being great, but it is a lot better than nothing. I agree that there are some pervasive ... almost stereotypical of schools, management failings. they are IMO around management of out of domain delivery - operationally and strategically. What I mean by that is that teachers are generally not challenged to manage people outside of their domain of teaching. They start as teachers and then take on responsibility for managing teachers and the delivery of teaching or teaching outcomes. Managerially they are underdeveloped because they don't have to deal with anything out of domain, i.e. stuff they are not themselves expert in. They can deliver operationally and drive strategic change because they are intimate with the domain - not actually the management of it, so the skills managers normally use to do that are not actually needed ... until they are! This kind of generalisation can be problematic. What do you actually mean by "we as a group"? There are as many opinions here as there are people. Our 'groupiness' is property of arbitrarily being contributors to a forum. We don't even all work in schools; Edugeek is a triangle of Schools/Suppliers/The Management (may benevolence herself shine always on their blessed selves). If you have a group in mind, it may only be in your mind - or at least the assumed group in my mind may differ. It is not obvious to me that our contractual obligations are made transparent by our posts in here. I would agree that you are right that there is a fairly constant flow of dissatisfaction but often that is met with everything from sympathy to derision; there are as many opinions as there are posters (yes dear lurkers, that's right, your opinion just doesn't count). We - me and you, as a group of my creation, agree on that and generally, if you feel you are being put upon, push back. The one thing I would say to everyone who is employed : join a union. That is a group that is purposely there to expertly represent YOUR interests. Not being a member of a union is like going into court without a lawyer or, to put it in language that is hopefully rings a bell, like asking an ICT teacher to configure your network infrastructure (if you are an ICT teacher you are invited to self-identify with those exceptions which prove the rule - there will always be some).

A question for everyone : You visit a website you like. Instead of the page, it pops up a dialogue box which offers you the choice - a website that is AD and tracking free, but you have to allow it to run some code in the background, or the usual page which contains code which connects to any number of web servers to identify and track you in the background. Which do you choose and why? Personally, as long as the code itself is well behaved, I'd pick the miner every time. The problem IMO, is not really what the code is doing, it is the sneaky way it is being done. But that is already pervasive and embedded, it is just that the code it is not mining crypto-tulips, it is mining YOU for personal data and spamming you with advertising. A bit of tulip-mining seems quite simple and honest compared to all that.

I've bolded what I might falg as "weasel words" "established norms" because that itself is an essential part of the question. What exactly constitutes normal use and when does use become abuse? Why is using CPU cycles to mine Digi-Tulips substantially different to using CPU cycles and bandwidth to render an advert? (An argument could be constructed that Bandwidth is more valuable than a few CPU cycles, so this is actually preferable ). I'd probably bet against that. Making money is much too important to allow ethical or moral considerations to hold back the searing uber-heat of innovation. What a time to be alive!

Out by an order of magnitude and a bit, it is estimated at 208 KWh or enough to power 7.2 US households for a day (or a Bangladeshi household for a year). Tulips anyone?

Sure and they have removed it. My point is that this will (is already) being used by other sites and being touted as a way to generate income as an alternative to advertising. Well, however fast your CPU is, you will have 50% left - most of which is probably spent NOPing or in idle loops. So let's compare two situations : 1. You visit a site and up pops an Advert that you have to sit through for 1 minute and for the sake of argument, that uses 1 billion CPU cycles to render the video. Following that you take 1 minute to do what you went to the site to do. 2. You visit a site and you get straight to what you wanted to do, which you do in 2 minutes. In that two minutes, the site uses 1 billion CPU cycles mining Crypto tulips. It seems to me that both situations are just as bad. I didn't want adverts and nor did I want my machine used to mine Tulips. I don't see much difference between them from the point of view of the user or us as a provider of IT : people visit sites, code is run on the local machine (yea so much for all this 'cloud' stuff!). Are you saying using a CPU, even at 100% is stressing it? That seems to me to be substantially untrue. CPU's do not wear out and if use causes it to fail, it is likely a manufacturing defect during fabrication, not anything wearing out (in modern electronic circuits, capacitors are about the only component with any actual shelf life that we would be impacted by).

Well ... I'd say the content of my job specification and contract is not a "feeling" or an "opinion". If I was asked to produce a policy, I'm not going to get away with "we will have to agree to disagree" with my boss. With policy I think the key is not who writes the policy but who signs it off as an approved/official policy and then how that policy is promulgated and the practice assured. I might write policy but I don't enforce it as such (I simply flag breaches to the appropriate people). If people are not following policy it is initially a line management issue and eventually, if the person continues to ignore policy, a matter for capability/performance management and eventually, if necessary, dismissal. So I think if you work in a school and policy is routinely ignored because of who it was written by, then you have systemic management issues that go far beyond inappropriate delegation.

This is being touted as an alternative to carrying adverts, so I suspect we will see more and more of it. I wonder if it is worth doing work to prevent it - it shouldn't get in the way of the user of the site (otherwise why would sites deploy it), so using a few more CPU cycles to visit the page - is that something that I should actually spend time/money to prevent?

I'd say that rather than being related to SLT membership, it is related to the job specification and that might be quite specific to your role in your school. So mine would cover producing a policy related to IT and some other areas, yours may not. In most senses, how revered staff are makes no difference to what is contractually required of them.

I think as @Marci says, the advice against using PDF's stems from a) the DDA and b) the internal structure of a PDF document itself, which is often extremely difficult for screen readers to deal with (as used by visually impaired) and sometimes impossible (i.e. text rendered by a PDF writer as a bitmap). Basically, HTML is accessible by design, PDF is not. That said it is not black and white. If you are careful (or lucky) when producing the PDF, you can produce accessible documents. PDF's have also improved over the years - both in functionality and the ability of software to produce sensible structured documents. So I'd summarise : exclusive use of PDF's to present information which must be accessible by the public carries a small risk, first of re-work if you are unlucky (i.e. producing naff PDF's) and someone complains, then secondly of a discrimination case if you refuse to do that re-work. Mitigation of the risk is easy enough, produce accessible PDF files or provide information in multiple formats.

Looking at it from a slightly different perspective, if an eSafety or Acceptable Use policy appeared out of the blue without any involvement from IT, there would likely be justified complaints, as the policy will impact operational delivery. Now, I may not be responsible and accountable for the policy but I am responsible and accountable for IT operationally. So IMO it is a matter of courtesy that someone would ask for input. If the policy is quite tightly bound to IT as AUP or eSafety, then I might expect to do a lot of the heavy lifting (mostly write it) even though I don't own the end product. I'd not delegate that to technicians - I'd agree with @bossman that it does not live at that level but IMO it may well be appropriate for someone at the Network Manager level.

While I agree with most of what you say, I'm curious as to how you discriminate between shirking and delegation. Delegation is an essential management tool; as a manager my job isn't to do peoples jobs but to ensure they do the work. When my managers give me a task, I delegate as appropriate to get the task done efficiently by those best placed to do that. I don't see that as shirking. I think I see more issues with managers who can't let go and who refuse to delegate than I do with people shirking. IMO the bigger problem in schools IS a result of poor management skills, but it is teachers who's management skills seem to be at the level of "treat everyone like a 12 year old child", a problem I put down to being shut in a classroom with children for decades and as a result having little experience of the real world.

Worth considering. I habitually hit cancel on the indicators every 10 seconds or so - I think it is baked into my DNA now.

Yes and no. I never get on a bike without thinking it is a bit silly and this time out it just might hurt. I get a similar but more intense feeling sitting in a glider at the end of 1500 ft of cable before the launch; I think it is an awareness that small mistakes or errors of judgement can be disastrous and that the decisions that need to be spot on often have to be made very quickly in what are usually stressful circumstances. However, I'd rather feel some of that discomfort than not, the trick is then to manage it so it keeps you alert and your mind on planning ahead rather than daydreaming on autopilot.

Yes - you need some kind of agreement in place. An employee will be compelled under contract to read and comply with your policy and procedure - a contractor or supplier won't, unless you put a suitable agreement in place.

Thanks for the heads up. I'll know to avoid them too when someone suggests them as an alternative to their projectors!

On a similar note, not wishing to hijack (but hell, everyone else is!), Our SMART lightrise projectors are failing at an alarming rate, all just on the other side of their warranty. I'd be extremely reluctant to buy any more SMART stuff.

We have two systems. First is public access via a voucher. They connect to a specific SID and are directed to a captive portal which validates the voucher. We use this for transient visitors who we do not want to create accounts for. Smoothwall applies the most restrictive filtering to this although we do not issue vouchers to students. Second, for 6th form we record the MAC address of the device in AD, which allows them to connect to the BYOD SID. They then need to authenticate as a user to pass through smoothwall. My biggest issue is bandwidth management, the ability of AP's to deal with large numbers of clients and the internet bandwidth they can consume. I'm not sure if that is better or worse than having a bunch of phones acting as hotspots and interfering with our APs. A shame smoothwalls bandwidth management is not up to the job.

I have an Ubuntu LAMPS server set up. I have some bash scripts which create accounts, a database etc and give access to resources they need from a CSV file. I don't allow drive mapping, they have to use ftp (or rsync etc) to move files - just like in the real world. It is used by a very limited number of students each year so is a reasonable compromise between ease of maintaining it and the functionality it offers.

Tips yes, but you need to design it that way from the start. As with many things, try to keep data separate from presentation (and analysis). So keep your imported data in separate sheets exactly as it comes out of the systems you export from. Your presentation/analysis is then kept on entirely separate sheets which only ever reference the import sheets. That way, you can overwrite the data in the import sheets and the presentation and analysis will simply update from that.

Sorry for a second bump. Your export file will need to contain an additional column after the email address with the heading : "Username (optional)". The code itself is functionally unchanged but I've updated the comments to reflect the new requirement. Notable that OUP chose to do work on the upload but not actually address the bigger issue - why anyone would pay for this rubbish is beyond me. # --------------------------------------------------------------------------- # Script : KerboodleReconcile.ps1 # Author : P.C.Structures # Date : Sept 2016 (Updated Sept 2017) # Notes : Reconcile MIS and Kerboodle student data and generate a file which # the idiotic, imbecillic, utterly appauling Oxford University Press # were too flumping moronic to provide. # # Input files are CSV and expected to contain header columns named # as: # # Surname # First name # Admission Number # Year # Email address (optional) # Username (optional) # # Process: 1. Produce export from kerboodle. # 2. Produce export from MIS # 3. Run this. # 4. Upload OUT_File to kerboodle. # --------------------------------------------------------------------------- $MIS_File = "c:\tmp\bromcomkerboodle.csv" $KER_File = "C:\tmp\KerbExport.csv" $OUT_file = "c:\tmp\KB_Upload.csv" #---------------------------------------------------------------------------- # Generic Multi level hash builder. Pass hash and array of node keys. Leaf # nodes are created as simple markers (integer = 1). All array elements are # created as hash keys. #---------------------------------------------------------------------------- function AddToHash { Param ($TheHash, $Keys, $level=0) $level=$level+1 $key=$Keys[0] $sle=$Keys.length - 1 if( $key ) { if( ! $TheHash.ContainsKey($key) ) { if ($Keys.length -gt 1) { $tmpHash = @{} $tmpHash = AddToHash -TheHash $tmpHash -Keys $Keys[1..$sle] -level $level $Thehash.Add($key,$tmpHash) } else { $TheHash.Add($key,1) } } else { if ($Keys.length -gt 1) { $tmpHash = $TheHash.Get_Item($key) $tmpHash = AddToHash -TheHash $tmpHash -Keys $Keys[1..$sle] -level $level } else { $TheHash.Set_Item($Key,$TheHash.Get_Item($key) + 1 ) } } } $TheHash } #---------------------------------------------------------------------------- # =========================================================================== # Main # =========================================================================== $MIS_Hash = @{} $MIS_Data = import-csv $MIS_File $KER_Data = import-csv $KER_File $OutArr = @() # Build a hash of students in Kerboodle export with Admission number as key foreach( $Student in $KER_Data ) { $MIS_Hash = AddToHash -TheHash $MIS_Hash -Keys @($Student.("Admission Number")) } # Check if student is already present in kerboodle, if not we want it for the out # file foreach( $Student in $MIS_Data ) { if( ! $MIS_Hash.ContainsKey( $Student.("Admission Number") ) ) { $OutArr += $Student } } # Spit out the CSV $OutArr | export-csv $OUT_File -notype # ===========================================================================

It is that time of year again and this thread might just be useful to anyone grappling with Kerboodle's utterly abysmal bulk user management.