[HN Gopher] Monopoly Technology Platforms Are Colonizing Education
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Monopoly Technology Platforms Are Colonizing Education
Author : partingshots
Score : 170 points
Date : 2020-12-06 09:07 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (instituteforpubliceducation.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (instituteforpubliceducation.org)
| sneak wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://criticalfuture.tech/issue-2-december-2020-jeffrey-pa...
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| This is also notable because in EU GDPR, under 16s/under 13s
| can't consent to corporations handling their data (can't open a
| regular Google account)
|
| An educational purpose gives corporations a "legitimate
| interest"-type argument for collecting whatever data they want,
| anyway.
| christophilus wrote:
| 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.
| threesmegiste wrote:
| 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.
| rmrfstar wrote:
| 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]
|
| [1] https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-schools.en.html
| Veen wrote:
| 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.
| souprock wrote:
| Individual liberty is not so great for a kid who likes games
| and useless videos more than doing homework.
|
| Somewhere around 1% of the kids can be responsible. Letting the
| rest go feral isn't proper parenting or school administration.
| [deleted]
| jejones3141 wrote:
| 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.
| boxfire wrote:
| 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.
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| 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
| Reedx wrote:
| If anything, tech is breaking up the education monopoly. Giving
| people more choices than we previously had.
| vulcan01 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://openstax.org
| ngmc wrote:
| OpenStax books are a great resource! I reference them in the
| high school math classes I teach.
| dchess wrote:
| 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.
| itronitron wrote:
| 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.
| ngold wrote:
| Education already does not have enough money, then these
| vampires come in with lock in anti competitive agreements.
|
| Ugg. I wish that money went to teachers.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| What was wrong with paper?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| 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.
| indymike wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway201103 wrote:
| Be glad there weren't any guns visible in the background!
| iNate2000 wrote:
| I hate the way it gets fuzzy when I erase and rewrite the same
| sentence over and over.
|
| And don't get me started on marker ink bleeding!
| young_unixer wrote:
| > 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.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| 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.
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That's not colonization. That's just offering a good, low-
| cost product.
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| 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)
| rvense wrote:
| I've already read people complaining that kids leave school
| without knowing how to use a "real computer", meaning
| Windows.
| sircastor wrote:
| This was the same complaint people had when Macs were in
| schools.
| rvense wrote:
| Egh, well, I'm a Linux user and software developer, and
| I've had one job that forced me use a Mac but none that
| forced me to use Windows.
| b5 wrote:
| 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.
| rvense wrote:
| 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.
| mperham wrote:
| My kid's school is all web-based these days, with Chromebooks
| and iPads both usable. Perhaps your school is different.
| com2kid wrote:
| > 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.
| itronitron wrote:
| Surface Pros are catching on but schools are still using
| G-Suite instead of MS Office.
| throwaway201103 wrote:
| 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.
| pelasaco wrote:
| 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.
|
| References:
|
| https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/the-absurdity-of-germanys...
|
| https://www.thelocal.de/20200908/german-schools-lag-behind-o...
| [deleted]
| souprock wrote:
| Assign pseudonyms to the kids.
|
| Hans Pfeil --> Lo Wang
|
| Consider also: tor browser, other VPN, blocking connections
| from browsers not in private mode, browser in VirtualBox, etc.
| pelasaco wrote:
| 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.
| tdburn wrote:
| Privatize schools
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| No mention of wikipedia and khanacademy.
| dijit wrote:
| Are? Don't you mean have?
|
| I grew up in a Microsoft classroom. "Computing" was excel and
| word.
| ksec wrote:
| >"Computing" was excel and word.
|
| 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.
| dijit wrote:
| But isn't that largely a consequence of those classes.
|
| Why would you use something other than what every new
| potential employee is familiar with?
| Spivak wrote:
| 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!
| dijit wrote:
| Genuinely, I agree with you. It's super powerful.
|
| 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.
| mhh__ wrote:
| 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.
| grogenaut wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway201103 wrote:
| > 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.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| Same for me in the early 80s. All boys and girls took
| shop, home ec, and typing. And Hunter Safety, as part of
| phys-ed.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| 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)
| dehrmann wrote:
| 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.
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| 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.
| dayvid wrote:
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| > 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.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I wonder if initiatives like this could play any role in things
| like the Gates Foundation donating billions of dollars to k-12
| education policies.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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".
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| > I'm so tired of articles like this that never enumerate
| solutions. Anyone can enumerate the bad things about something.
|
| Highlighting a problem is very valuable. Enumerating solutions
| is a completely different issue and often requires completely
| different skillsets.
|
| The argument "don't talk about a problem if you don't have a
| solution" is a logical fallacy.
|
| > I know nothing about the education system beyond this post
|
| ...
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's of pretty limited value if it turns out all the
| solutions are worse than the problems.
| dreen wrote:
| 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.
| dash2 wrote:
| "Terrible software" is an understatement. Backboard gave rise
| to this epic rant:
| https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/01/christ-i-
| hate-b...
| [deleted]
| easton wrote:
| 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).
|
| 0: https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/learning-tools-
| interopera...
|
| 1: https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/common-cartridge
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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).
| samizdis wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://moodle.org/mod/forum/index.php?id=5
| lostapathy wrote:
| Moodle is a nightmare to admin, though. Or at least was a
| couple years ago when I got out of it.
| TheP1000 wrote:
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| - 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.
| jka wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] - https://www.edx.org/about-us
| throwaway201103 wrote:
| My experience with EdX is servers getting owned because the
| security was terrible.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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).
| grogenaut wrote:
| 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.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > 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
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5981053/
|
| Our digital tools for kids with dyslexia
|
| https://www.irislink.com/EN-US/c1849/IRIS---Digital-tools-fo...
| itronitron wrote:
| 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| 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.
| itronitron wrote:
| 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.
| postingpals wrote:
| 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.
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| "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.
| momokoko wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I don't know, books were pretty good.
|
| 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.
| 0goel0 wrote:
| 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.
| grogenaut wrote:
| 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
| rapnie wrote:
| > 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.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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.
| friedman23 wrote:
| Their use of language is so ham fisted it's comical.
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