However, there are a few interesting and humorous things you can do with WebCT, that are not necessarily security bugs but allow so-called "shenanigans". I'll start with a feature that I reckon you could cause a heart attack with - the Calendar.
You see, in an attempt to turn WebCT into a Complete Groupware Solution, everything in WebCT has a calendar. The University has a calendar, which would be useful from time to time if it actually had anything in it.
Every course has a calendar, so lecturers can publish when all the lectures are, and when the assignments are due, and so on. It requires lecturers to publish all the information themselves, which not everyone is willing to do. It's handy when they do.
Every student has a calendar, too. Just in case you don't already have a free diary or an online calendar, you can use WebCT's mediocre calendaring interface to keep track of your very boring social life, or even more boring thesis timeline, or whatever.
All these calendars are tied together by little boxes on your personal home page, which takes the University's calendar, and all the calendars for the courses you're in, and your own personal excitement tracker, and combines them into summaries showing you that there's a lecture on at 4pm or that you had an assignment due an hour ago.
Bored yet? Here's the interesting part.
For some courses (I suspect it's a default setting), any student can create a calendar item in the course calendar, and it will appear in the calendar summaries of everyone else enrolled in that course. There is no way to tell who the event has been published by on the front page, and you have to go digging - quite hard - in order to find information on exactly who it was.
Over here are some medical students. Hi, Medical Students!
Medical students are incredibly highly-strung about all things assessment-related (so much so that we were recently told "you're never going to be perfect, so stop obsessing about your results").
I'm sure you've worked it out by now. Although ethical concerns prevent me from actively trying to give someone panic attacks, I'm pretty sure that publishing an appropriately-timed fake assessment in the calendar would result in some very distressed students.
Do I advocate removing this feature? Well, it depends if lecturers trust students not to be sneaky, cunning, malevolent, and ultra-competitive. Over here are some law students. Hi, Law Students!
(Extra points if you spotted the way I used ethics to justify not proving my hypothesis!)
2 comments
Nat :: Wednesday, April 18th
So what you're saying... is that I can change Unit calenders, and not be tracked??
David Adam :: Wednesday, April 18th
You can't change other people's things, and you can (eventually) be tracked, but you can pull some hilarious pranks.
smurch :: Monday, May 7th
Dude. That was really funny!
Especially the hotlinks to McMenamin and blackstone.
Seriously, most meddies would find this quite hilarious. It easily is on par with the clever articles in embolus etc. Try and find a way to get this published, complete with links and you'll surely have an audience.
