Amazon, Microsoft join Italy’s initiative to offer free Wi-Fi, eBooks | Hacker News Reader

Amazon, Microsoft join Italy’s initiative to offer free Wi-Fi, eBooks

alugy.com

153 pointsLagogarda40 comments

As far as I can see, Teams is going to gain A TON of users in the coming weeks, most universities and schools are starting to use it to provide online lessons to their students, far more than Meet

The go to software is actually Zoom. It does webinars and has a host of features specifically tailored for this market.

Universities are by-and-large, not Microsoft shops.

Teams is picking up from Lync/Skype-for-Business in many Microsoft shops.

Do you have any data? Are you from Italy or speaking from your bubble?

I couldn't find any data about Italy. From personal experience in neighbor country Croatia, all universities are Microsoft shops and nobody even knows what Zoom is.

I'm from Italy and I can speak for my University (Verona). All of my teachers are using Zoom either to do lessons or to talk to students privately. I'm kinda surprised since they're paying for Office365.

From my personal experience in Croatia, I never used a Microsoft product during my studies. Moreover, using Linux was mandatory for some courses.

My comment was specific to Italy :) I know people in at least two universities that are using Teams and Stream for online lessons (many universities in Italy use Office 365)

At least in Germany all universities allow you to use most Microsoft stuff for free.

I think you mean that Universities pay some MS EES Agreement to Microsoft in order to offer OS updates, Office and other MS software for students and staff.

I don't know how it works at a university level, but at least when i did some admin stuff for a university department office 365 was free for students and staff.

I don't think the university pays for that, I believe MS just offers them for free to some folks to get them hooked, it's the same as BizSpark and other initiatives.

I can confirm that University pays for MS EES Agreement. In return you can, for example, install office on every pc in Active Directory, upgrade to every windows operating system on pc owned by the University (for example you buy Windows Home on a pc, you can upgrade to professional edition) and so on.

You're right, it's a paid service, but they usually get substantial discounts (smaller schools can even get it for free if they have the right contacts)

I thought a lot of schools took advantage of DreamSpark, or what ever the education program is called now. When I was in school, we could log in and download pretty much any Microsoft program or OS (server and consumer) with full licenses.

We didn't use any of the Microsoft programs as part of our education (no skype or teams), I think we transitioned from GMail to Outlook Online by the time I graduated

As a student in one of the main universities in northern Italy, I can tell you the lessons are provided through the open source platform BigBlueButton. Student/teacher personal sessions although seem to rely primarily on skype.

In University of Bologna all professors are supposed to use Teams.

Which one? PoliMi for one uses Teams (glad to know someone is using OSS software though)

PoliTo, and I was kinda surprised since we too take part in the Microsoft partnership program.

Strange, a BBC news clip I saw the other day had an italian professor saying they are all using webex.

I can't imagine how frustrating using that for lessons (so multiple connected parties) would be - it's hard enough to make it work with just two parties. Either the video works and no sound, or sound works but no video. Or just doesn't even connect.

Very unreliable from what I've seen.

did they show webex? or might it have been a 'kleenex' brand name issue? any video-conferencing is 'webex' to a lot of folks.

I'm teaching at University of Trento. At the moment I'm using google meet + google classroom. Today my class was followed by 45 students, and everything worked well. Yesterday I was unable to record the lesson, but today it worked. As a backup, I used Audacity to record the audio (the slides are freely available online)

My school in the midwest USA will probably be using meet. As we already pay for gsuite.

Gawd. Teams is so rubbish compared to Slack: - team channels are stuck in their own area away from DM and ad hoc group chats - content seems to disappear - downloading files, and in particular pictures, and then finding what it has been named and where it went is a nightmare.

I'm fairly concerned about SARS-CoV-2, and think it's going to be absolutely awful - but although it's already terrible in Italy I don't think it's yet terrible enough that I believe this is a genuine outpouring of moral solidarity. Maybe that doesn't matter, but my gut reaction is pretty far from 'oh that's jolly good of them'.

I got an email from Meraki today capitalizing on the virus, encouraging me to run a few demos of the teleworker units. The whole thing was about saving my employees from exposure.

It's absolutely gross.

I don't quite get why it's gross.

Presumably you'd want to find wfm/etc. solutions ?

If the company came across as trying to cash in on an international crisis, I can see why that would be off putting.

Because A company capitalizing on a crisis for personal gain is disgusting.

Simple stuff.

I saw a thread on r/sales asking how the virus was impacting people's quarters. There were several sales people reporting that their SaaS leads were coming in so quickly they were almost overwhelmed.

I hope that this Corona virus epidemic is going to be the thing that finally pushes broadband expansion to the countryside in Germany...

As this is nothing you can change by pushing a button in your billing system i wouldn't hold my breath. But how much bandwith does in really need for remote work as a office worker? RDP should work ok over anything better than dial up.

I was thinking more about schools switching over to remote education like they currently do in China. I guess that this sort of app and video conferencing system is currently infeasible in the more rural parts of Germany due to lack of bandwidth.

Its not only the lack of good infrastructure. The schools don't have the necessary skills to maintain these kind of systems and often don't have enough money to outsource

That is true but also kind of my point: The epidemic Europe is facing could be the kind of event that triggers the necessary changes and investments for this to type of development to happen. Given Germany's federal-style education system I'm not holding my breath though...

You can call it what it is: a pandemic.

It'll likely never happen in the United States because of what you mention and the fact that NSLP (National School Lunch Program) and the SFSP (Summer Food Service Program) feed a LOT of children.

My fiance is a high school teacher and they began preparing online lessons yesterday in the event they need to shut down for 2 weeks but they're also scrambling to figure out how to feed the kids the 2 meals a day a lot of them get and how some of the students are going to do their laundry. A good portion of the students do their laundry at school in coin-operated washers and dryers in the home economics room.

In her first class of 30 something students, all but 2 or 3 get fed 2 meals a day by the school via NSLP. Yesterday she was also telling me the school nurse is concerned as many of the students come to her for basic over the counter medicines and feminine products. She's also a track coach and it was cool and wet yesterday, most of the students shwoed up without the provided hoodie/pants and said they didn't want to get them sweaty because then they couldn't wear them to school (implying they had no means to launder them except for at school) so her and the other coaches rounded up all of the stuff that had been left by previous years and she took it all home to wash and mend ripped pockets to bring back for those students.

When kids are depending on the school for their meals and basic medical/hygiene needs... I can't see online classes becoming a thing for many of the schools in the country.

You know, after this comment has percolated in my mind a bit it suddenly hit me that 'the stacks' in Ready Player One are much closer to reality than I'd ever expected.

Honestly I had no idea this was the situation in high schools until we started dating. I would have been class of 2003 and sure we had some 'poor' students but we only had a handful of immigrant/refugee kids that you'd see getting the free food (we typed our code into a keypad that carried a balance or paid cash, you could always tell who was on a free lunch though because you were restricted to what you could take and everything was a la carte).

Her current school also has some serious drug issues which was quite surprising to me. They had to expel some kids for vaping something other than nicotine in the past 2 months, turns out they were vaping something that contained fentanyl (how they got caught, they kept falling asleep in class and were hard to wake), they regularly have bring in drug dogs for both marijuana plant matter and thc vape cartridges, they recently had to remove two students for having sex on grounds and had to turn them over to the police because the male student was filming it with his phone and they were both underage, etc.

It would be amazing if we could just let kids attend from home when sick, during adverse weather, during outbreaks (lice, COVID-19, chicken pox) but the stuff she keeps telling me...

A school here has at least 2 students confirmed with COVID-19 (Avon, Indiana schools) that decided to close all of the schools this week and it's almost entirely a solid middle class school and even they've had trouble just this school year with some instances of drugs and a senior committed suicide around the holidays which sent a bunch of kids spiraling.

I obviously don't know how things are in Europe but I think schools are between a rock and a hard place here in the United States. In many cases teachers may be the only positive attention kids get in person, and the only one that will notice when something is wrong (at her current school and her previous school cutting has been a very big issue).

I'm rambling but the state of schools right now deeply concern me. This up and coming generation seems to have far more problems than mine did.

Holy crap.

This made me recognize my privilege and the massive gap in facilities between schools. I never thought it was that bad in some American high schools. I went to a pretty high-performing school where the biggest problems were anxiety and depression, not (this still shocks me) actual hard drugs.

Thank you for sharing your SO's experience. It's eye-opening to say the least.

Yeah it's been very eye-opening to me too. Prior to this school she was teaching on a Navajo reservation near the Idaho/Utah border. I didn't realize just how bad reservations are. There she said she had students that often only had 1 or 2 outfits and would wear the same clothes to school every day, so she'd find reasons to 'reward' clothing and she'd go to thrift stores and buy a bunch of t-shirts/jackets/hoodies. She also had a lot of students who's parent(s) were in jail/prison and were living with relatives, students that had been sexually assaulted by relatives, students that absolutely did not want to be there but came anyway for the meals.

It just blows my mind that even here in the United States you can have kids graduating high school with 2-year Associates degrees as well that have access to 'robotics labs' and the like while you have kids, sometimes in the same city, that have to do laundry at school.

If you start massaging reddit and various teacher's forums, you can see this over and over though in apparently every state in the United States. Schools with all the fancy stuff and schools that are basically places for kids to come to eat 2 meals and try and stay out of trouble for a third of the day.

What gets me also is the sort of things students write on their papers/tests. She'll show them to me as she grades them and you'll have very nihlistic catoons drawn out as maths answers or "I'm stupid fail me" "I don't get this fail me" type phrases or just complete nonsense written. She showed me one recently where the student had to have spent the entire test writing and stylizing her name in some elaborate work while not answering a single question.

I definitely have a lot more respect for teachers now than I did prior to meeting her.

Starlink I think is built specifically for that so you have a reason to be hopeful

This is awesome for students from poorer districts who have no access to the internet when COVID-19 keeps them from school. A fairly good move for education equality. Besides, it would be better if free (cheap) tablets are also offered.

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