TECH briefs

Morris Brown College To Require
Laptop Computers This Fall
ATLANTA — Morris Brown College will require its students to buy laptop computers this fall, offering them at discount prices as part of school financial aid.
School officials say they believe Morris Brown is the first historically Black college in the nation to make laptops available for purchase to all its students, but not the first college to require them.
The school says it bought 2,750 laptops with 500-megahertz processors and six-gigabyte hard drives from Toshiba Corp. to resell to students. The computers will be offered at discount prices determined by students' financial aid packages. They also will be offered to teachers.
Also this fall, students will be required to pay a $250 technology fee each semester.
Morris Brown is 119 years old and has about 2,000 students.

Some Colleges Blocking
Explicit Web Sites
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — Some colleges are blocking sexually explicit Web sites and even penalizing students who continue to try to visit a banned site.
Lee University has blocked Web sites for several years. When students reach a blocked site, they will see a seal with a watermark, says John Dixon, director of information systems at Lee University. A message appears saying the university has blocked the site.
"If a Web site doesn't support our university's mission, then there's no need to have it available," Dixon says. "We do the best we can to block sites that are not positive."
Jody Brewer, a senior biology major at Lee, agrees with the policy. "I've heard of people trying to go to those sites. I have filtered Internet on my own computer."
Henry Hicks, executive director of information systems at Southern Adventist University, says the university's "main goal is to block pornographic sites. People can accidentally go to those sites," he says.
Northwestern Technical College in Rock Spring, Ga., is looking into blocking software for its on-campus computers.
"We've had a lot of pornography and hack," says Ted Glenn, director of information technology. "We've never had to do this before, but we've had problems with the computers in the lab."
The Department of Technology and Adult Education in Atlanta monitors all Internet traffic in Georgia to make sure that people are not visiting explicit sites instead of working, Glenn says.
All colleges in Georgia are beginning to block Internet sites, and Northwestern is taking this very seriously, Glenn says.
For the first offense, he says students will be warned. If they are caught visiting a banned site a second time, they will lose their computer privileges. A third time, they risk being suspended.
Some schools, such as Lee, also block sites that use a lot of bandwidth out of concern for the cost of bandwidth and how much space is taken up for pleasure, rather than education.
"It's resource allocation," Dixon says. "If you only have so much space to get data back and forth, it makes sense for one to reserve that space for pertinent information."
However, he says exceptions can be made if a faculty member needs to use a blocked site for research.