Some faculty report that students complain about slow access to the Internet. Faculty can turn those complaints into an opportunity to help students become aware of how their network file-sharing "habit" affects all network users.

"Last fall and spring semesters, at the height of the Napster controversy, I had students grumbling about how slow the network was," Richard Gordon, IT-User Services, said of his experience teaching CSCC355 (Computers, Ethics and Society).

"At the beginning of each term, the majority of the students not only said they were using Napster, but they argued to defend their use of that software."

According to Gordon, regardless of their philosophical opinions on the copyright issues involved, students changed their tune once they saw how student use of file-sharing services like Napster was affecting the campus network as a whole.

"After they saw the actual network data and saw how many gigabytes of bandwidth Napster and other applications were using, they understood almost immediately why we were concerned," he said.

"In fact, I would then receive e-mail from students, not complaining about the network being slow, but expressing concern about how other students' excessive downloading and uploading of music and videos was keeping them from getting their homework done."

To show your students how much traffic travels over the campus network and then over the Internet, consider discussing with them the charts displayed at [http://entropy.nss.udel.edu], recognizing that the majority of the "unidentified" network traffic is from successors to Napster: file-sharing services such as Aimster, KaZaA, Morpheus and BearShare.