I think the largest tech monopoly platform in education is the text book publishing racket. They have moved on from trying to come out with "new" versions every couple years to selling "ebook" platforms that are, of course, drmed and proprietary and students can only access for a limited time. So even if you wanted to keep your books you can't.
To make things worse, at least in my field, the only "interactive" platforms are pretty pointless and consist of watching a video and answering questions about it. I was using a creative commons book but I was "asked" to use the same book as others so it wouldn't be confusing for the bookstore (which is owned by Barnes and Noble who run tons of college bookstores)
This. Cengage is the one I've had to use - your take tests within cengage's website, which is only accessible by buying the book, and the grades are reported back to the school's online course platform (blackboard for me). I didn't ask, but I would be surprised if the instructor offered any alternative to taking those tests and hands-on labs.
Yes, I didn't even mention that these "ebook" and "interactive platforms" are really just ways to eliminate the used book market so that students can't buy used books or use older editions that are 90% the same.
In a way, I'd prefer books that are licensed to just me and 50% cheaper just so I don't have to deal with selling books back at 40% of their purchase price.
They're only 50% cheaper because they want to make them more attractive than physical copies. If they ever kill the physical publishing they will charge whatever the hell they want for DRM'd digital copies again.
The actual printing/shipping costs are a rather small percentage of the full cost of textbooks.
States and State College systems should fund an org to create standard open text books for everyone to use. The content can be refined and tweaked with updated pedagogical techniques and knowledge as they develop.
The ebooks don't need to be bound by regular page numbers and the print books can be compact guides and references.
For something like K-12 math that doesn't change much over decades and should be easy to avoid politically charged issues in, you'd think states would band together to fund a public ___domain text book.
In education they use the acronym OER (Open Educational Resource) and there are a number of textbooks that are released as OER. I was using one but was "asked" to use the same one as everyone else.
Part of the problem is that while the math doesn’t change, the approach to teaching it does.
Every decade or so there’s a new broom as the new administration fumbles to “fix” education. Recently it’s been NCLB followed by ESSA. Meanwhile there are also trends and fads in education research, which trickle down to the classroom through teacher prep programs and administrators who need to look innovative in order to keep their jobs.
Not all of this is bad! If your old methods aren’t working (they’re not), it’s worth trying new ones. But it does mean that even in math you’re never going to get an “ultimate” textbook.
In college my classes in the business school would hand out binders containing the PowerPoint decks for the whole semester and would usually make them available online as well (some were even accessible to the public). Classes were also recorded for later viewing. The arts & sciences classes required textbooks. The professors were often co-authors of those books too. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the quality of education was vastly superior at the business school. For more reasons than just using textbooks vs slide decks but that was a factor.
I taught English in a Japanese Junior high and elementary school. The government makes the textbooks with input from senior teachers and they're all inexpensive paperbacks. It makes much more sense when I consider the gigantic expensive hardcover textbooks I would get as a kid. They were quickly outdated and occasionally filled with obscene writing from previous students.
I'm so tired of articles like this that never enumerate solutions. Anyone can enumerate the bad things about something. You don't need to know anything about the situation to do that, so why leave the analysis at the minimally-developed step?
Analyzing the situation before schools ever used cloud platforms and why these platforms are alluring to begin with should be a big part of this discussion, because you must understand how you got here to ever understand where to go.
For example, when I was high school in the early 2000s, the most advanced setup my high school had was for students to use USB sticks or email the teachers assignments, and it sucked for everyone. The teachers each came up with their own effort to track files. And there was a lot of work for teachers, e.g. students forgetting to attach the file. Or, a clever hackerman such as myself, deleting a couple bytes in the file before attaching it to buy myself an extra day.
In university, the school used Blackboard which is apparently very expensive and definitely very underwhelming.
After those two experiences, I'm not surprised that Google suite is a true breath of fresh air for schools and students alike. I know nothing about the education system beyond this post, so I would love to hear something more informative about the situation than "capitalism bad".
I just accidentally got a hackerman like you expelled from my daughter's uni. They sent a peer review for a doc but sent it 3 minutes before deadline and was corrupt. Being helpful programmer and teaching daughter I opened it with a hex editor. Top of file referenced /var/www/corruptmyfilecom. Which seems suspicious. It's a also a website for exactly what you suspect. This was for 5% of grade on assignment and meant to boost your grade by rewarding engagement and peer review.
Daughter dug further and found the doc text (so proud) and it was a outline with loren ipsum in it. Dated 3 minutes before the corruption.
This started the chain of events where one student was no longer in class, teacher was flabbergasted at stupidity for zero gain, and then kid not being in school anymore (I guess was not first issue). Uni it department also checked and verified and added to autoscans in monopoly software. Daughter got full credit for assignment since she had noting to peer review.
I should of been suspicious, I haven't seen a corrupted small file in years.
Hackerman is there but so is overly qualified accidental white hat
My high school they made me the IT tech support. I ran between two campuses and was called out of class regularly. Novell Netware, Windows 3.11, some BBS stuff? The only thing I didn't do was AV work.
I took my "job" very seriously. Started though because I was absolute always playing around on every system, which meant admin / root access, from the big local educational BBS to the library systems to the academic support stuff (I never played around with the grading system at all thankfully because most of the time it was just because I was blocked from doing something like use a disk in a drive or whatever).
Whoever setup these systems did things like whitelist apps, so if you wanted to use windows calculator it was blocked. So I'd jump into admin and run it from there. Nothing malicious. But I think they did have a bit of a debate (in hindsight) about which way to go, discipline or rope me in. I think the librarians carried the day actually because I'd been helping them with the netware stuff when I was in library hour (printers not printing / computers not working right / whatever).
Blackboard is terrible software. I have a feeling it's the most classic example of "design by committee" where all decisions lie with admin staff who never ever have to use the software. They just approve whatever has the biggest list of features. They earn so much money from tuition fees and care so little for usability of basic tools its astounding.
I'm not in education software myself but it seems to me a solution of sorts would be to push for standardization:
- open data exchange formats
- open communication protocols
- open social identity platforms
This doesn't fix the problem but at least it gives power to the people to do so. However, it won't happen on its own because it's not in the best interest of anyone currently in position to do anything about it.
Yes blackboard is absolutely horrible. One of (many) experiences I had, was a course coordinator for a project course where students submitted a research report at the end. We needed to get the reports uploaded to turnitin through the platform, the interface for doing this was horrible enough, you essentially needed to check the reports in a big table and press upload selected to turnitin. The thing would just randomly fail and no reports would be generated. After much fiddling I found that the process failed likely (I don't quite remember how I found this) because in the background blackboard would generate a zip or tarfile and then upload that to turnitin. The thing was the VMs they seemed used were horribly under provisioned, so the zip or tar process would run out of memory and be killed. The thing was, there was no easy way of knowing how many reports reliably worked, so the solution (proposed by blackboard support) was I should just go to every report individually and upload. A process that took about 3 h because the interface was so horribly slow. Considering that I was already completely overworked (80h weeks) not a suitable solution.
Fortunately, many universities are moving to other platforms. Where I am now we use canvas, which is open source and really like night and day compared to blackboard. I also heard good things about moodle (another OSS solution).
I've used Moodle a couple of times, including building a course from scratch three months ago. It has a good feature set out of the box, has plenty of plug-ins for add-on functionality and - for me, the best thing - a really helpful and responsive user community. (See the forums [1])
Documentation is also refreshingly comprehensive and up to date.
So you are aware your dislike of Blackboard for reasons above are misplaced:
- TurnItIn is a 3rd party Blackboard extension and the school selected to use this.
- The school was also likely self hosting an under provisioned system.
I'm sure there are plenty of valid reasons for you to dislike Blackboard, but above cases are the school in question and TurnItIn.
- I know that turnitin is a 3rd party extension, however it was failing on the blackboard side if I recall correctly.
- The university was not self-hosting as far as I know. I was not in the IT department, so would not know 100%, but in my interactions with IT they said that the service was hosted by blackboard and we had limited control over the system, e.g. pretty much every issue had to be escalated to blackboard.
Do you have any experience with EdX[1], out of interest?
While I can't speak for the specific formats and protocols they use, they're a non-profit, are founded & governed by educational institutions, and develop their service using an open source software model.
Those aren't guaranteed to result in a better result for users and institutions of course, but they would seem to avoid some of the worst-case scenarios that fee-based for-profit platforms might find themselves developing into.
EdX was trying to create a community around their software as well. Although the person I know who was there working on that left and I don't know the current status.
That's only part of the solution though. Even if EdX, as far as it goes, is an open platform, someone needs to run and support it for schools, you need email and doc sharing, etc. etc. It's fine to say that everyone should just run Linux, OpenOffice, and so forth and just shrug if that's too complicated for a lot of students and teachers. But that's not an actual solution.
In principle, the government at some level could do its own collaborative/learning software and host it but people would perhaps rightly then ask why the government isn't using readily available commercial off the shelf software like most companies do.
I felt like edx squandered a bit of their value by being so harvard focused. Like, they built a search engine so that instructors could search through all the course materials created across all edx courses. But then it was only available at Harvard. And there lacked a connection or understanding that edx could be very useful for traditional courses as much as moocs and could have benefited from user interaction studies there. Oh well. All that is still doable. But apparently education is happy with blackboard and zoom.
I never really felt the Harvard focus. I've taken at least MIT and Harvard courses on it. Maybe others (not really sure what has been Coursera and which EdX). Probably the biggest issue for me is a general one with MOOCs. They mostly solve for something which really isn't that much of a problem (broadcasting a video). Other things not so much.
My experience over the past nine months is that there are a lot of platforms with work pretty well with experience facilitators for a modest-sized group. And nothing that is really very satisfactory for interactivity at scale, especially with a heterogeneous audience (except in the most glancing way like poll questions).
I used to do research on how students use educational technology, like video lectures, in moocs. So I guess I'm probably biased because I know a lot of the edx people and some of the behind the scenes stuff.
I agree that interactivity at scale is super difficult. The problem is that in a course you are teaching more or less solved problems to bring students up to speed to where the field is. So the same questions get asked from class to class and group to group. There's the idea that you can compile all this knowledge and questions and then provide that as a resource to students. But actually the hardship of getting through those questions, even though they are the same, is how they learn. So the resources are nice for instructors but not as useful for students directly. There's definitely a lot of space for innovation but most of the people doing that either lack the technical expertise of developers etc because they come from education departments or they lack the ___domain knowledge of education research. There's a somewhat large space to fill with people who are good at both.
This already somewhat exists in the form of LTIs[0] and the Common Cartridge format[1], which are standards for application interoperability (i.e, how an app exchanges data with an LMS) and data exchange (export course content from one LMS and bring it into another), respectively. Social identity isn't really used, instead most institutions use Shibboleth/Gsuite/Azure AD as a SAML Auth gateway that authenticates users to services. All of these standards are supported by Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle and pretty much every other LMS that wants to get traction now (since all your other software expects it).
Jira is another good example. Or enterprise software like oracle or salesforce to a degree.
When the response to your question to the customer of "what features do you want" is "every part of my job I don't like" it's going to end up that way. Or you'll loose the bullet list bingo during aquisition.
Enumerating problems is the first step toward a solution. It's also valuable in making people aware of the problems. If you feel like you have read enough about the problems already, congrats, you're informed enough that you're not the intended audience.
And if someone's tiredness is, as you apparently believe, the most important criterion for whether something gets written, allow me to point out that I'm tired of the "don't bring me problems, bring me solutions" routine. I associate it with bad, authoritarian managers. And I think it's even less justifiable when the complainer a) isn't who the article was addressed to, and b) is complaining about a problem without offering a solution.
Yeah but this space/topic is FULL of people enumerating problems. The parent comment isn't saying that enumerating problems isn't useful, they are pointing out the lack of any actionable next steps being provided is the problem.
I think we still need to reach the step of enumerating why the problems are problems before it will be clear to people why and how they can be addressed.
Because corporations have become extensively global they now have extensively more reach than individual governments.
I find it is whether this is concerning to a person that typically indicates how they feel about things like in the article.
So the “solutions” are about dealing with a large quantity of multinational corporations as opposed to education or other things.
Do we continue to try to unify governments globally as was done with the EU?
Do we’re work towards international trade agreements to standardize the rules for these corporations such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership?
Do we limit the size vertical integration of corporations via anti-trust regulations?
There are also other potential tools, but in reality this is a difficult modern problem that will likely define the direction of the next hundred years of human history. Personally that feels important enough to me to keep an open dialogue as we search for solutions and identify specific issues to the current situation.
This is illogical to say that you cannot criticize something if you don't offer a solution. Why don't you put in the work to find a solution instead of demanding others do it for you?
Besides, plenty of work has already gone into proposing solutions to monopolies, it's more likely that you just don't like any of them. What must be done now? To me it seems the best thing is for you to come up with a solution you like, since only you know best.
“Why don't you put in the work to find a solution instead of demanding others do it for you?”
I think that’s what OP is criticizing the author for. It’s far easier to point out problems (especially when lots of other people have already written about them) than it is to suggest a solution.
Why should pointing out problems come with solutions? If some corporation causes me or my community harm, I'm gonna point it out. If they pay me to, I'll come up with solutions.
There are issues with remote interaction which are pretty well understood, including by companies and other organizations spending a heck of a lot more money and tech resources than secondary schools have available. I'm in meetings at least once a month that relate to these topics. Some things are working pretty well. Others not.
The whole article complains that 1) corporations give users everything they could ever want, 2) making it an "impossible dream" to build public cooperative platforms.
They already know what the solution is, but they pretend it's impossible in the premise of their argument, so they don't have to face reality and actually start building it.
> Anyone can enumerate the bad things about something.
Similarly, anyone could enumerate the good, right?
Let's start here.
I've gone searching for solutions (in the specific field of dyslexia education) but haven't been able to find much, or vet what I found. But I found two things. If you can find more, let's start a public list.
A Digital App to Aid Detection, Monitoring, and Management of Dyslexia in Young Children (DIMMAND): Protocol for a Digital Health and Education Solution
> I'm so tired of articles like this that never enumerate solutions. Anyone can enumerate the bad things about something. You don't need to know anything about the situation to do that, so why leave the analysis at the minimally-developed step?
Amen. It seems like 99.9% of all online content that address already well-known problems are like this. I find myself increasingly tuning out, no matter how well-written, if there isn't a good portion dedicated to actual solutions.
The primary problem from my perspective, as a parent, is that there is no standardization in how teachers set up their classes on these platforms. Assignments and instructions are scattered across different platforms, it would be nice to just have a syllabus for each class with information on assignments and tests.
Too bad the capitalists came in and locked schools into pricey purchase agreements that required slick new books to be re-purchased every couple of years and started to drain our school budgets.
As someone that works in K-12 technology (and has for 15 years), the real monopolies aren't the tech giants, they're the Pearsons and Houghton Mifflins of the world that buy out competitors and lock school districts into platforms they can't escape without substantial migration costs.
And don't even get me started on the way they have kept education hostage to high stakes tests.
Alternatively: Education actually has plenty of money, but too much of it is leeched out by low value vendors charging high premiums for easily replaced commodities, low value administrative staff performing easily automated tasks, and public-sector unions filling their coffers and the coffers of friendly politicians, long before teachers receive a penny, many of which then have to shell out for materials out of their own pockets, materials which ought to be provided for by their employers.
I went to public schools which were thick with staff, and for the life of me I could never figure out why there was any more staff than the faculty, the principal, the vice principal, a secretary and maybe a janitor and lunch lady. Even the libraries, IT tasks and sports equipment were maintained by faculty. Janitorial tasks and catering could be good exercises for the kids if you wanted to cut some staff because frankly a good number of kids, myself included, could have used the extra discipline growing up.
Meanwhile there were too many unused classrooms, too many kids per class, too few seats and tables and too few lockers. Teachers were paying for printouts and unreturned textbooks (that the students didn’t return to the teacher) but the administration sure had a thick wad of newsletters, handbooks, forms, reports (not all to do with the students, mostly administrative crap) and all manner of garbage for us to take home every single week.
I think a lot of the question here is in the Administrator/Faculty divide. Is a special education teacher faculty? What about learning center, where students who need extra help in a specific subject go while the rest of the class continues regular learning? What about specialists who teach computer, science, garden, art, music? (And who give the teachers a break during the school day.)
As for administrators, the ones I see at schools are usually needed: a nurse or medical aide, a psychologist, a librarian, two front desk people (both so you have backup if someone is sick, and so you aren't without someone if a student/parent needs assistance out of the office), custodians are important (you need two, one for daytime, and one for nighttime. Yes, students can do cleanup at some point, but not K-3 at least), etc.
> Alternatively: Education actually has plenty of money
It doesn't--even if you get rid of the "administrative staff".
The Gates Foundation went through and analyzed this for younger students (early middle school and younger). It takes roughly $15K per student do what you need: two fully qualified adults in a classroom of 15 with sufficient resources. This allows you to bring your poor performers up to average in 3 years.
Not good--just average. Every single one of those initiatives were cancelled because of money.
People claim they want better education systems--until they have to actually pay for it.
What were the overhead costs associated with educating each student and why two adults?
For a class of 15, 1 teacher is sufficient, and even if you reduce class sizes to 10, that's one teacher per 10 rather than 1 per 7.5. The school district I grew up in spent about $13K per pupil in the school year following my graduation (easiest year to find quick and dirty data for), and still had all of the problems I outlined. I assure you, it wasn't going to high teacher salaries when I was in school.
So how about we do trim off some of that fat, give the teachers a raise, and then evaluate whether we need the additional spend?
No, it's not. And we have LOTS of research on that.
Some young child always has a problem. When that happens, the attention of a teacher is completely tied up. You need two so that the class can keep going.
>Almost all high-quality early learning programs, including all of the programs featured in this paper with outcomes that stick, have teacher- child ratios of 2:20 or better.
I think the elephant in the room, however, is the enormous wealth transfer needed to provide the necessary home environment for a child to succeed at a similar level to children who do have homes conducive to academic education.
Thank you, I’m on the clock but first impressions from the first few pages: this does not appear to be a document detailing the cost of a basic education, this appears to cover supplementary programs.
Fine if that’s what you want to discuss, but not pertinent to the high cost and low quality of a basic K-12 education provided by public schools. These types of programs are more suited for a social services budget.
So here is what I have been looking at all these years: my State’s K12 budget[1] and student body[2].
You don’t need a Gates Foundation report to see this information, it’s all public, and searchable, and has been for a very long time.
Per pupil spending[3] includes capital, materials, labor and any other operating costs including public debt. School districts, at least in my State, tend to finance their buildings through bonds and own them outright, so they’re not paying rent but they are making regular debt payments on at least some of their facilities.
So when you look at what is allocated in the State budget which includes non-State sources, the Cal Department of Education was allocated about $91B and change divided across a State student body of about 6M and change, 6.7M if you include charter school students, for per-pupil spend of about $13K and change, ~7Kish from the State. The non-State sources are mostly Federal from my recollection, I’m typing this on the fly and don’t have time to double check hence my liberal use of rounding, but not necessarily so.
This does not include funds raised by the school districts themselves (see [2] for how many of those there are) nor contributions from local governments which sometimes but not necessarily so contribute to the district funds.
If you want to do some back of the envelope math yourself, I’ve given you the basics, you can find the equivalents for your own State of choice on your own, and figure out if there isn’t a better way to effectively allocate what already exists. Chromebooks didn’t exist the first time I did this exercise, but the existence of very cheap laptops has brought this figure down over time. It’s both fun and depressing!
I might be okay with this if powerschool wasn't a total effing mess of a platform, but I'm not because it is absolutely a total piece of shit.
While I appreciate that there is some complexity to what the platform needs to accommodate, navigating the user interface usually involves more work than completing an assignment.
> The most successful colonizer has been Google. A recent report indicates that Google’s G-Suite for Education is being used by half the teachers and students in the U.S.
Are you fucking kidding me?
The most successful "colonizer" has always been Microsoft! In most schools around the world the PCs are running Windows exclusively and you are taught how to use Microsoft Office tools.
The influence and vendor lock-in Microsoft have had in the education sphere during the last 2-3 decades is much bigger than whatever Google is doing now.
That absolutely was true, but today Google reigns supreme, at least in New Jersey. Almost all class laptops are chromebooks, and the low end models are so cheap that it actually isn't crazy at all to hand them out to every student. G-Suite, especially Google Docs has completely supplanted Microsoft products. Few middle- or high-schoolers ever touch them.
You're not most people: most people will work in environments that use Windows PCs. I've worked a bunch of office jobs, and every one has used Windows.
Yeah, true. Everything's Windows, so if you expect schools to teach computing in the sense of "... and then you click this button" I suppose they have a point.
I'm just really happy I've never had to use Windows.
In my school Google Docs caught on because students opted to use them for collaboration. Then teachers caught on. Then the school caught on. Google was successful by first winning the users rather than selling to the school directly (though that has changed with Chromebooks)
Oh absolutely, I was just responding to the idea that Microsoft is completely dominant in education and always will be. Google is offering a service that works, and solves a lot of problems with integrating education and technology.
Same in NY. And it's fine. The primary underlying technology is G Suite, not search. The content available via Classroom is tightly controlled by teachers. There's tons of education products on the market and they're mostly garbage. Software that looks like they have never met a student or a teacher before. Classroom isn't great but it doesn't do much beyond present a list of assignments.
It used to be Apple. When I was in school (1980s), if the school had computers they were Apples. Even for most of the 1990s this seemed to be the case, at least from what I saw.
> The most successful "colonizer" has always been Microsoft! In most schools around the world the PCs are running Windows exclusively and you are taught how to use Microsoft Office tools.
Years ago I briefly worked adjacent to the MS education team.
One of their KPIs was how close they were to catching up to Google.
Chromebooks came in and swept the market. Microsoft was blindsided, I'm not sure how their efforts to catch up have been going.
Chromebooks are fine, if they boot from coreboot to debian.
If you don't teach people to value individual liberty, a lot of people won't. Maybe that makes good workers, but I doubt it makes a good civilization.
"The deepest reason for using free software in schools is for moral education. We expect schools to teach students basic facts and useful skills, but that is only part of their job. The most fundamental task of schools is to teach good citizenship, including the habit of helping others" [1]
Moral education according to the Gospel of GNU is not what schools and teachers are incentivized to achieve. They don't give a crap about that because they're too busy trying to get kids through tests on shoestring budgets.
The problem won't be solved by preaching, but by providing software at least as capable as Google Drive without the monopolistic tendencies. If you have a solution to that dilemna, I'm sure teachers will be all ears.
> The problem won't be solved by preaching, but by providing software at least as capable as Google Drive without the monopolistic tendencies. If you have a solution to that dilemna, I'm sure teachers will be all ears.
Teachers have zero time or resource--tools like this need to be managed by not teachers. Schools have no budget--tools like this will land where the cost is least.
That solution exists--it's called G-Suite on Chromebooks.
The admin time and cost drives everything in the schools.
Yet, eventually, they are going to be an adult who has to contend with issues of motivation and responsibility. If not during childhood, when would be the time to learn those skills? It seems like the stakes in childhood, both for the individual and for society, are lower and the consequences of failure less dramatic.
One of my kids learned at age 17, when he realized that adulthood was bearing down on him. Suddenly, the need for employable skills became much more real. Before that, it was a sort of far-off theoretical thing that didn't really count.
Learning by failure doesn't work with a kid who just doesn't care. Kids often don't see a reason to care because the future seems so distant. Flunking classes doesn't seem to change anything, and there doesn't seem to be a reward for passing classes. Video games are fun. YouTube has fail videos, cartoons, make-up tutorials, and so much more.
Uh I always saw the analysis packages specific to a ___domain being pushed so hard on students as their exclusive means of learning material to be this form of colonization. Matlab, SAS, Mathematica, each pushed in programs I enrolled in and students out of them are dependent so much they are guranteed buys (and set the next generation into working 'ONLY' via those software). Sure they have competitors, but there is so much lock-in that practically if you learned how to do all your analysis for a particular program in one you are never leaving and totally dependent. Some like me resist. Use R! Octave! Maxima! Of course the classes would ask for things specifically not easy to do in the free versions that are nearly turn-key in the commercial ones. This form of 'get-em before they know any better' should be regulated (by the university, not the government), and professors should be encouraging unique solutions, not punishing out of the box thinking. Whatever, its an empire, carved up for the industrialists and investors. Nothing to see here, move along.
I agree and I’d go further that when possible having the student code their own solution would be far more educational than using a package/software someone else built
This is a bait and switch. Forcing you to do business with Google (which involves giving up some of your civil rights in their ToS) to get what you've already paid tax dollars to receive is... bogus, to put it lightly.
We really need to do better around enforcing laws related to gating access to public services behind signup walls.
I was recently interviewed and the discussion ended up on this exact topic:
This is my biggest problem with it. Students have no choice in what technology they run. It is forced on them, and they have no choice but to accept the ToS. Now, I’d be all for a course on why those ToS are BS, and how to go about running free software on the devices.
Yes. And I also wish my teacher told me Excel runs the world. I always thought Excel was some school / student tools for basic spreadsheets, it was only decades later did I realise the world is literally run on spreadsheets.
To say that Excel is as dominant as it is today in casual business programming because of the meager amount that’s taught in schools does a disservice to the fact to how damn powerful it is. It’s Microsoft’s Emacs!
But you sort of made my point by comparing it to emacs.
Open source (or at _least_ open formats) can be incredibly powerful. Unless you’re claiming that Excel could only come into existence because it’s proprietary; in which case I don’t understand.
Excel has an incredibly strong pull because it's been integrated onto a lot of learning material now, and because it barely changes any old features. When I joined in PE a few years back, one of the study materials provided to us dated back to 2000. The videos shown used shortcuts, features and formula that are still used today. Even now, finance guys remember those keyboard shortcuts from those old videos like they are mantras or nursery rhymes - especially when knowing those shortcuts or features let's you go home by 10 instead of 2 (this was a line in the training video actually lol).
My point was to reason why Excel has a strong pull compared to Emacs. They locked in customers early on, then coupled with backwards compatibility, ensured that everyone kept using it. Which is why GSheets barely made a dent on Excel, even though it had much needed collaboration early on.
I was probably quite lucky to have a former programmer teaching me.
As a 15 year old the teacher was absolutely hammering us about readability, variable names, and more philosophical aspects of writing good code. I didn't exactly do him proud by writing a Turing complete interpreter for my coursework, when we were supposed to be making a troubleshooting guide, but it definitely rubbed off on me.
He also taught us to touch-type. I'm not that fast (95-ish WPM) but seeing people my age fumble around pecking away at the keyboard is a bit sad.
I learned touch typing from out head football coach/athletic director (my school required you taught one class as a fte). Giant man. Basically said "don't be like me kids" and comically fumbled through 20wpm. For some bro kids back in the 90s having someone like that mock your typing was very effective. (He was nice to non jocks).
College football coach cemented it a bit more saying he had to pay someone to type his master's project in for him. By that time I had started coding classes and that's what really upped my wpm.
I think not being able to type is one of the more ironic reverse sexisms currently. Many schools didn't allow boys to take typing or home ec, nor girls to take shop. Now you see granddad's struggle to communicate (my uncle doesn't even have a phone my aunt does), and the grandmother's being quite fluent.
> Many schools didn't allow boys to take typing or home ec, nor girls to take shop.
When/where was this? There were most definitely boys in home ec and girls in shop when I was in middle school (late 1970s). And many boys took typing in high school. This was in a conservative midwestern state.
For the other high school (maybe even college?) kids out there that want a free alternative (especially if your teacher doesn't specify a textbook), OpenStax by Rice University is pretty good. I've used their textbooks for the past few years.
I am really done with this kind if tech news. Most biased times for tech news. Article starts with Facebook but nothing mentioned in article about Facebook. Its a bandwagon. I will never believe any articles mentioning Facebook.
Literally just now I realized my daughter was finishing an e-learning assignment where she was recording her own voice on this web app on her school provided Chromebook. She caught me discussing a private matter in the background and it is now uploaded and can’t be deleted.
Yes, the Zoom calls have the same potential but those are scheduled so we at least know when we are being listened to. What am I to take away from this? That you should just assume you’re always being recorded in your own home and act accordingly?
All because paper isn’t cool anymore. I suppose I’m expected to audit every feature of every piece of ephemeral e-learning software that blows like a whirlwind through my home. But 10 years ago, I didn’t have to ask if an assignment had a listening device in it. If I had, people in white coats would have come to take me away.
Right now, the schools are treating the kids as they have not rights. For example, no right to delete the video with the private conversation. I had to lawyer up to deal with my kids school pushing "safety" software on the computers my kids use (that I own, that connect in my home network) that was leaking data to Chinese and Indian servers (there was some kind of affiliate background ad clicker that was bundled with the software or something). This will have to change.
Was this distinction necessary to make your point? Last I checked, the Chinese and Indian population do not have a duopoly on ad fraud/malware. Your racist projections conveniently sidestep the elephant in the room. Said monopolists:
1) are aware of ad fraud on their platforms,
2) enable this fraud,
3) have been caught in their own lies about ad metrics, and
4) are wilfully ignorant of said fraud because $$$.
Specifically calling them out for something everyone does is irresponsible and backward. This will have to change.
> The way these monopolies have been colonizing public education has, however, gone almost unnoticed. This is rampant privatization sneaking in as essential to “21st Century learning.”
There is a great deal of irony to the premise of this article, and the careless use of the term 'colonizing' is downright offensive. Actual colonization of education has happened on the backs of public education as a means of centralized indoctrination and cultural control. Private education does not have the same consistent history of colonization.
For example, in India the British introduced the English education system as part of a push known as Macaulayism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaulayism). Macaulay literally believed that the British empire had a moral right to colonization. In India, he helped realize this through the English Education Act of 1835 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Education_Act_1835), which put a end to traditional education systems. Those traditional systems (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurukula) were much more decentralized and distributed, and relied on spoken language to forward the inherited language of the Indian peoples. The change to a one size fits all public education system cut off inherited learning and broke cultural continuity in a way that is hard to recover from to this day.
This played out again more recently in Tibet (https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/03/04/chinas-bilingual-educa...). The introduction of centralized public schools in Tiber, with an emphasis on bilingual education (slowly displacing Tibetan with Chinese languages), and shared education standards (a way to indoctrinate children with one set of political/cultural views) are all really pathways to completing the colonization of Tibet by China.
The true education monopoly tends to be in centralized government-driven education systems where parents are forced to pay into the system and children are forced to attend. Public education is exactly that. In America for example, we largely have a single system, with shared standards like Common Core (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core_State_Standards_In...) and with a monolithic workforce. After all, the National Education Association is the largest labor union in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Education_Association). This makes education a common route for implementing political goals, which we see in things like the NEA pushing its educators to deploy the factually-incorrect "1619 Project" into classrooms because it aligns with their body's political culture. When the same patterns played out in the Soviet Union, through institutions like their Ministry of Culture, Americans were happy to label it as propaganda and indoctrination. And yet they can't see the same problems in their own system.
What we need is decentralization of education, which does require introducing private education as a competitive alternative against public education. Parents should be able to choose which schools their children attend. They need more choice in terms of what they are taught and what they spend their time on. Local jurisdictions need locality of choice, rather than being chained down by unions or top-down standards imposed by state or federal governments. Competition in education, both through private and public channels, is critical. The lack of it amounts to a monopoly held by the public education institution. And as for this article - it's focus on technology choices is a red herring at best, manufacturing a problem and summoning outrage when the real problems with the "colonization" of education lie elsewhere.
Great comment. Complaining about the "colonization" of education is a waste of time when "education" itself is a farcical treadmill of wasted time and indoctrination.
A friend and I were chatting about the argument about whether or not "Under God" should be in the pledge, and he made the following point:
Mandatory education? Sure.
Mandatory attendance? Sure.
Governnment-approved curriculums? Sure.
Mandatory taxes to pay for the mandatory, government-approved curriculum? Sure.
Include "God" in the pledge of allegiance? Whoa there, Adolf, we don't want the government indoctrinating our kids!
It's ironic that the Institute for Public Education should be concerned about monopoly technology platforms. The educational monopoly to be concerned about is government schools.
TL;DR
I would love to see the schools in Germany using Google G. Suite for education.
Long story:
Shortly before the first lockdown was announced in Germany, I helped one school to setup the Google G. Suite for education and run a pilot. Cheap solution, everything works, easy to share exercises and the solutions. Mobile first solution, features-wise was everything that every teacher dreamed of.
Then as expected, because of "privacy issues" (none of them really existed, we talk about them later) the School had to move to a closed source, half-backed state solution (that nobody knows how much costs to develop and run). From the user point of view (Teachers and Kids) and web development best practices in 2020. Most schools are not using it and instead are trying to do everything offline. We keep running G. Suite for extracurricular activities, which are optional, but mostly used by kids that want to go to the High School. As usual I'm sure that the state-based, closed source, tax-payer supported solution, isn't the best one.
We used pseudonyms. The other extra layers of technologies are simply not a reality in the schools (Elementary Schools). Either the parents don't care or in some cases (Refugee kids), they just have one mobile telephone to access the internet.
To make things worse, at least in my field, the only "interactive" platforms are pretty pointless and consist of watching a video and answering questions about it. I was using a creative commons book but I was "asked" to use the same book as others so it wouldn't be confusing for the bookstore (which is owned by Barnes and Noble who run tons of college bookstores)