You may or may not know that BYU (Brighan Young University) had a 3 year ban on YouTube that was just lifted last week. There maybe some of you on sharenotes.com that are at the school so feel free to weigh in here if you like. Originally the ban was put into place because it was thought that this was in accordance with the conservative policies and traditions of the school and of course the Mormon Church with whom is it associated. In 2006 the administrators felt it best to ban the site from being viewed on the BYU servers.
So what happened? Did the student body organize a massive rally because they too wanted to see the likes of Chocolate Rain and Star Wars Kid freely as the rest of us? Did they storm the deans office demanding their YouTube, banners held high proclaiming their demands? Well, not exactly, in fact the real reason might surprise you. It was actually a group of professors, believe it or not, that complained that by banning YouTube outright, they were unable to access the cache of educational video housed therein. Yes I know I was as shocked as you, but there are actually a great deal of educational materials, tutorials, music lessons, art, literature, even home improvement how-to’s videos on the Tube. Many of them a great resource to the professors and their students. Somewhat surprisingly the administration acquiesced to the staff requests seemingly without a fight and lifted the ban. It seems they too saw the educational merit in (some) of the content on YouTube.com
Like many schools in the sharenotes.com community BYU’s servers still run a robust filtering system that limits the boundaries that even the most daring BYU student is willing to push. I wouldn’t take this move as a sign of a loosing of the guidelines by which the school tends to operate, that system seems very much intact. I’d like any feedback from those of you that have thoughts on this story, especially if you’re at BYU, please feel free to comment, I read them all and quite often will reply as well.
