Eliminating harmful digital technologies in universities

My son is a freshman in a Research 1 level university.

I'm quite shocked at how badly the "technological tooling" works.. Everything is done online, but nothing works as intended.

They were given iPads, but the MDM blocks things like uploading files to browsers (needed to submit homework).

The instructors time lock all lesson plans and assignments, which makes it impossible to plan ahead, but many of the assignment dates are also wrong, but none of the students can see that and point it out (back in my uni days.. in the 90s.. having a printed copy of the syllabus let us review the whole semester and point out any errors or omissions).

Another typical scenario: students are invited to submit an assignment draft for extra credit. They submit it through the assignment portal. The assignment portal is set to allow only one submission per assignment, so they can't submit the final assignment online. The instructor will protest and say, "You were supposed to submit the extra credit via email, and no.. I won't accept the final submission via email." This is not clarified anywhere in any communication the instructor can point too, but the instructor has a zero tolerance policy with late submissions, or incorrect submissions.

COVID hangover is still a thing -- most university offices are locked, you can't just walk into an advisor's office, or the financial aid office, or the scholarship office, or the dean's office, and ask for an appointment. Every office has a difference "behind a wall" means of requesting one -- some want email, some have a tool, some require a referral -- which means it's practically impossible to do the business of being a student without a monumental overhead and a lead-time tax.

It's like this all day, every day, across all his classes. And the old canard -- we're paying for this.

I also suspect a contributing factor, beyond "universities aren't enterprise orgs and can't effectively manage all this with a rotating cast of participants every semester", is the prevalence of part-time instructors -- they're just not invested enough to contend with all the complexities of all the difference university tooling required to run a class.

> I was recently asked: “Which digital technologies could we get rid of in higher education?”

I would like to make it a requirement that paying tuition entitles students to submit their coursework and have it graded, even if they never purchase a textbook with an online course code.

This isn't really about technology. Tech is just an easy scapegoat. Focusing on the negative impacts the author identifies [0] makes sense, but going on a tech witchhunt is just a distraction. Ask if you're doing something that results in the bad outcome, period, don't get caught up in the tech

[0] (meta comment, how do I make a list in HN markdown?) The list of negative impacts from the article is below:

- disenfranchise and disempower - dehumanise - discriminate and exclude - extract or seek rent - coerce and bully - mislead or manipulate

> By contrast, the latest releases of Linux happily run on much older computers without entitled seizure of the owner’s operational sovereignty

To me this is a big issue, I have seen many comments from Univ. Students majoring in Computer Science stating use of Linux is banned (nevermind *BSDs). Universities should encourage the use of Linux, less of a chance of a virus hitting their network. And if you are majoring in CS, to me, using Linux is a must.

Technology is inherently harmful. We'd do much better as a society with a blacklist first approach rather than a 'chase the cat' after it's out of the bag.

"Threats hardly seem appropriate for a progressive learning environment, but for decades I have taught inconsolably anxious students mortified by attendance reports, submission systems and other machinery that sends nagging notifications, not to mention spurious or false warnings"

Dude, I agree with what you're saying, but I also think unnecessarily wordy prose is itself a system of oppression.

After ten years of people claiming that everything they happen to personally dislike is objectively "harmful" and ought, therefore, to be banned, I'm exhausted and fed up. Technology is not harmful. If the market isn't weeding out "harm", it's not harm.

To break actual surveillance capitalism in general, and to be in topic in Unis specifically there is a very simple thing: THIS YEAR most student sign a letter to their unis stating this will be the last year certain practice will be accepted. From the next year all the signer will not pay anything to the uni if only one crappy tech survive.

A little 30% of student suffice.

If not: surveillance capitalism win.