Monopoly Technology Platforms Are Colonizing Education
instituteforpubliceducation.org
instituteforpubliceducation.org
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)
The actual printing/shipping costs are a rather small percentage of the full cost of textbooks.
The ebooks don't need to be bound by regular page numbers and the print books can be compact guides and references.
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.
What OER sites and books would you recommend for your domains?
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'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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
Documentation is also refreshingly comprehensive and up to date.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
0: https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/learning-tools-interopera...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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
...
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.
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.
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...
And don't even get me started on the way they have kept education hostage to high stakes tests.
Ugg. I wish that money went to teachers.
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.
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.
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?
https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/documents/lessons%20from%20...
I saw this on page 15 though:
>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.
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].
[1] http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2020-21EN/#/Department/6100
[2] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sd/cb/ceffingertipfacts.asp
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.
[3] https://definitions.uslegal.com/a/average-per-pupil-expendit...
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!
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.
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.
Here's the staff directory of an elementary school near me. Which staff would you cut? http://www2.goleta.k12.ca.us/lapatera/staff-directory
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.
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.
I'm just really happy I've never had to use Windows.
What happens if Google randomly closes a student's Google account?
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.
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]
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.
Somewhere around 1% of the kids can be responsible. Letting the rest go feral isn't proper parenting or school administration.
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.
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...
An educational purpose gives corporations a "legitimate interest"-type argument for collecting whatever data they want, anyway.
I grew up in a Microsoft classroom. “Computing” was excel and word.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would you use something other than what every new potential employee is familiar with?
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.
Neither emacs or Vi have broken backwards compatibility for much more than just 20 years.
This is an old problem that the FSF has been warning about for years, if not decades.
And don’t get me started on marker ink bleeding!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
Hans Pfeil --> Lo Wang
Consider also: tor browser, other VPN, blocking connections from browsers not in private mode, browser in VirtualBox, etc.