Is there a loophole for screen sharing?

[ProfessorForbes]

We have a university sim.  One of our faculty would like to offer academic advising and we have purchased a media screen for this purpose.  It works great!  Within Second Life, we can go on the student advising website using our username and password, and see all of the student information (classes taken, grades, etc).  

The problem is that only the faculty that signed on can see the contents on the screen.  For example, when my colleague signs in, he sees everything but all I see is a color-blocked screen.  The same thing happens when I sign in and he sees a screen with panels of color. 

We imagine that this is a security feature embedded within our University website, but is there a work-around for this?  We would love to be able to offer advising this way. We purchased a $1L media screen -- would a more expensive (and thus, more features) screen make a difference?  (BTW, two screens side-by-side wouldn't work because the student does not have access to the advising information that faculty do.)

[Rolig Loon]

Speaking as a former senior academic administrator, I am surprised that your university's registrar makes any provision at all for accessing a student's academic records outside of the university's own firewalled system.  If my faculty had advocated for something like that, the registrar would have opposed it fiercely as a security issue.   I suspect that the color-blocked screen is your own registrar's way of doing the same.  You should ask her/him and whoever is in charge of IT on your campus.

[Lindal Kidd]

OMG, don't do it!  As Rolig says, this would reveal a LOT of Real Life personal information, which is against the Second Life Terms of Service.  But that's the least of your worries...I'd be concerned about a huge lawsuit.

You might want to consider moving your educational region out of Second Life entirely and onto a virtual world of your own making.  The free OpenSim software can create a region very like a Second Life one right on your own PC (more than one region, even, if your computer can handle the load.)  These regions can be accessed by anyone with an OpenSim compatible viewer (most SL third party viewers will work) and the correct address.

One benefit of creating your own private world is that it's FREE.  You will, however, need to have a computer geek handy to set it up and keep it running.  See here for more information:

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page  The official page for OpenSim

http://iliveisl.com/  A blog by Ener Hax, an enthusiastic user of OpenSim for educational purposes.

Oh...one other downside.  The enormous variety of content that's available in SL won't be available.  You can download a lot of free content from the websites of other OpenSim users, or get free copies of people's creations on other OpenSim powered grids, e.g. OSGrid.  But you will want to have lots of creative people around, in addition to your tame computer geek, to build stuff for your regions, clothing for your student avatars, and so on.

[ProfessorForbes]

Thank you! I did speak to our IT people and they were surprised we got as far as we did, but nothing about "don't do it" was ever communicated. Thank you for this useful information.

[irihapeti]

Is not the IT tech heads you should be worried about. Is your Compliance Officer