Dartmouth has recruited seven students to begin testing the Xythos online file-storing system today. The system will allow students, faculty and staff to save documents in an online folder and share them over the internet.
Xythos will allow study groups to share a common set of files, students to back up data and professors to post a single set of materials accessible to multiple classes, Malcolm Brown, director of academic computing, said. The system will also be integrated with Blackboard, the class management program, Brown said.
"Students don't have anywhere on Blackboard to put things other than their course site," Brown said. "They're at the mercy of the faculty."
The testing period will continue through next week, and Dartmouth's free trial of the system will end in mid-June, according to Brown.
Cory Cunningham '10, co-chair of the Student Assembly's Student Services Committee, suggested to Brown that the College look into a centralized file-storing system last fall. Computing Services decided this spring to test Xythos in this capacity. Cunningham is a member of The Dartmouth Staff.
The College will not police students uploads, Brown said, but each student will have a finite amount of space to store files. Xythos will not facilitate illegal file sharing, according to Cunningham.
"If people can Blitz songs to each other now, it's no different than downloading it from a server," Cunningham said.
The College is awaiting the results of the student testing to make any further decisions about the program, Brown said.
"Although it may do everything we want, if it does it in a way that people can't understand, it's not useful," he said.
Computing Services chose Xythos because it has a reputation for being the most user-friendly commercial file-storing service, Brown said.
Student testers will evaluate the program to determine if it is user-friendly and helpful, Cunningham said. Computing Services recruited the students through a mass e-mail message to campus. The students will be compensated with a one gigabyte flash drive and a $25 iTunes gift certificate.
If the College decides to adopt the software, Computing Services hopes the system will be operational for the Fall term, Brown said. There are several steps Computing Services must take to implement this kind of new system, he said, including securing funding, buying servers and integrating it with the College network.
The Xythos system is currently used by other colleges and universities, including Northwestern University, according to Northwestern representatives.
The decision to test Xythos is part of the "Dartmouth Digital Initiative," which focuses on improving and updating the computer services the College offers, Brown said.
