Wikis, education and blocked websites

Just a series of links concerning wiki's for this one: Wiki's what are they and how to use them and How I use wiki's. What do you do?

Although its a little ironic - most of the links that I want to go to are blocked by our Education department. As an educatator I want to access these links for the reasons that they were blocked in the first place - for example a skypecast about wiki's and education is blocked because it is "Chat". It's the little things like this that can spring up - unblocking isn't a problem for me - getting a website unblocked can be a real hassle; I remember when I started out. A block appears at the last minute and you have to locate the person who can unblock it, ask them to do it, and then perhaps wait ... wait until they get around it, wait until their humour improves, etc. At any rate, some of the links are blocked for reasons that are hard to explain your way around - for example bittorrent is blocked (reason "illegal") by default at my site. Now to explain why you want to access it (i.e. some files are 'free' - for example a bootable linux version of gcompris) that I want to try out on some of our older classroom PC's. It's not a 1 minute chat to explain why it's free, why the block can be removed without fear of repercussion. Well, there's this little thing called open source software ... But you have to contextualise this conversation against less than clear job descriptions, informal workplace norms / conventions that have established themselves. You know, the usual stuff - you can have all the official support in the world, but you end up having to work through other people that haven't been apprised of all the official support that you've been afforded.

Anyway, better get off to work.