Sh1mmer – An exploit capable of unenrolling enterprise-managed Chromebooks
sh1mmer.me
sh1mmer.me
https://web.archive.org/web/20230130125805/https://sh1mmer.m...
Github:
We managed to figure out how to override our typing program to give certificates saying we typed 200wpm at 100% accuracy. By passed the internet filter to access gmail (back in it's early days, we held onto that ability for a while) and a few other things I forget about now. He was one of my favorite teachers.
This is really wholesome. Like that guy. Be like that guy.
VSCode on a Chromebook requires VMs and Containers which require "Developer Tools" and "Powerwash"; or the APK repack of VSCodium that you can't even sideload and manually update sometimes (because it's not on the 15-30% cut, and must use their payment solution, app store with static analysis and code signing at upload).
AFAIU, Chromebooks with Family Link and Chromebooks for Education do not have a Terminal, bash, git, VMs (KVM), Containers (Docker/Podman/LXC/LXD/gvisor), third-party repos with regular security updates, or even Python; which isn't really Linux (and Windows, Mac, and Linux do already at present support such STEM for Education use cases).
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30168491 :
> Is WebVM a potential solution to "JupyterLite doesn't have a bash/zsh shell"? The current pyodide CPython Jupyter kernel takes like ~25s to start at present, and can load Python packages precompiled to WASM or unmodified Python packages with micropip: https://pyodide.org/en/latest/usage/loading-packages.html#lo...
There's also MambaLite, which is part of the emscripten-forge project; along with BinderLite. https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes (Edit: Micropip or Mambalite or picomamba or Zig. : "A 116kb WASM of Blink that lets you run x86_64 Linux binaries in the browser" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34376094 )
It looks like there are now tests for VScode in the default Power washable 'penguin' Debian VM that you get with Chromebook Developer Tools; but still the kids are denied VMs and Containers or local accounts (with kid-safe DoH/DoT at lesat) and so they can't run VScode locally on the Chromebooks that we bought for them.
Why do I need "Developer Tools" access to run VScode and containers on a Chromebook; but not on a Windows, Mac or Linux computer? If containers are good enough for our workloads hosted in the cloud, they should be good enough for local coding and calculating in e.g. Python. https://github.com/quobit/awesome-python-in-education#jupyte...
Jupyter Notebook and Jupyter Lab have a web terminal that's good enough to do SSH and Vim. Mosh Mobile Shell is more resilient to internet connection failure.
Again though, Running everything in application-sandboxed WASM all as the current user is a security regression from the workload isolation features built into VMs and Containers (which Windows, Mac, and Linux computers support in the interests of STEM education and portable component reuse).
Disclaimer: I work on ChromeOS.
Are flatpaks out of the question? Used to be "Gnome and Chrome" on ~Gentoo.
Shouldn't the ChromiumOS host be running SELinux, if the ARC support requires extended filesystem attributes for `ls -alz` and `ps -aufxz` to work?
Chromium and Chrome appear to be running unconfined? AppArmor for Firefox worked years ago?
https://www.google.com/search?q=chromium+selinux ; chrome_selinux ?
It seems foolish to have SELinux in a guest VM but not the host.
`adb shell pm list packages` and `adb install` a list of APKs and CRXs.
Here's chromebook_ansible: https://github.com/seangreathouse/chromebook-ansible/blob/ma...
Systemd-homed is portable. Still, "Reprovision" the broken userspace for the user.
Local k8s like microshift that does container-selinux like RH / Fedora, with Gnome and Waydroid would be cool to have for the kids.
Podman-desktop (~Docker Desktop) does k8s now.
K8s defaults to blocking containers that run as root now, and there's no mounting thee --privileged docket socket w/ k8s either. Gitea + DroneCI/ACT/ci_runner w/ rootless containers. Gvisor is considered good enough for shared server workloads.
Repo2docker + caching is probably close to "kid proof" or "reproducible".
VScode has "devcontainer.json". Scipy stacks ( https://jupyter-docker-stacks.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using... ) and Kaggle/docker-python (Google) take how many GB to run locally for users < 13 who we don't afford cloud shells with SSH (Colab with SSH, JupyterHub (TLJH w/ k8s),) for either.
Task: Learn automated testing, bash, git, and python (for Q12 K12CS STEM)
- [ ] task manager: optionally show SELinux contexts like `ls -alz`
"ENH: Terminal and Shell: BusyBox, bash/zsh, git; WebVM," https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/issues/949
After a week, I'd stolen the credentials of everyone in my class and the class after mine. And then, I did... nothing with it, because I was already able to finish the homework in class and had a high grade.
The teacher busted me because I had a file in my home dir called stolen_passwords.txt. But instead of punishing me, he made me help him patch all the security flaws I'd exploited. It inspired my decision to go to college for comp sci. Best high school teacher ever. (a few years later, I had graduated with a comp sci degree. and he was trying to recruit me into selling amway. oh well.)
I love how this same vulnerability was discovered independently and exploited by students all around the world!
Teacher didn't care if we bypassed it, as long as we put it back before class was over.
Eventually I figured out how to use the dial up to see naked pictures. Old man changed the dial-up password, wouldn't let us use the computer.
Occasionally, when he was around he'd let me online for legit school stuff. I'd heard of keyloggers -- featured prominently in stories about catching cheating lovers -- so while allowed on for legitimate reasons I got on Altavista and was successful in downloading and installing one. Couple days later I had an opportunity to kick off the program while no one was around. It worked -- got the password.
Ended up in military signals and then cyber. Now a fatass IT guy working remotely. Adversarial relationships spark learning, it seems, be it parents, school, war, etc.
They claim to be in high school, and the way they converse seems to match.
They're good kids. Good hackers.
I used to do tech support for a school district with some ~5000 Chromebooks in circulation and we did all of our repairs in house. This meant I spent the first few weeks of COVID bringing home boxes of damaged devices and spare parts and getting them back into working order. Occasionally I would have to do a board swap for a bad power jack or something which meant you would have to overwrite the serial number on the new board to match the old one so that it would join Google admin as one of our devices. If I remember right the process would have worked the other way around too, to change the serial number to one we didn't control.
If someone is smart enough to find this and unenroll their device, they're probably smart enough to be left to their own devices. (Literally)
Trust me, I know. I was one of those kids. Except back in my time I was running my own RDP server to get around the proxy servers while also hosting a Web server that had Ultrasurf on it for the others.
The one thing I didn't share or open my mouth about? My exploit to kill Faronics Insight. Sure, my machine would suddenly show 'offline', but the lab monitors inherently trusted me in general ;)
(And to Mrs. Remington, if you're out there on HN somehow, I'm sorry I was your little IT nightmare!)
Getting a zero on your next hw/quiz/lab/test, because your machine was non-compliant and you didn't know how to switch it back, is fair.
Then reimage the machine on IT's timeline.
And if mom and dad want to bitch, they deserve to be told that little Timmy screwed up his own laptop.
In the case of the pencil, I'd expect the student to just put up their hand and ask for a pencil to do the test with; and the teacher to begrudgingly provide them one—mostly due to the possibility of the accidental case.
Would that not be the case for school-issued laptops — just grab one from some cart of "extras" and tell the student to log into that one to do the test?
The school owes you a working device, if they give device-requiring assignments.
But the responsibility passes to you once you modify or use that device outside of its default settings.
Which, IMHO, would be a great life lesson to teach!
https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromiumos/platfo...
In a professional environment, the last time I wrote on paper is when my computer was in for maintenance. That's like having students use hand-slates in the era of paper.
Because anecdotally: I retain more when I take notes on laptop than if I took no notes. I also retain more when I take notes on laptop than if I took notes on paper because my typing speed can keep up with the topic and my writing speed cannot.
We also have a golden opportunity to teach them where "cut" and "paste" on their parents' computers come from, using real scissors and actual nasty, lumpy paste.
Apple invented it for iOS 3.0 in 2009.
Fountain pens were an older invention, but poor reliability and cost kept them out of common use before the early 20th century.
I doubt either progression was controversial. Basic penmanship is similar with all of these.
Ballpoint pens gained popularity around the 1960s. That was (and is) controversial -- ballpoint pens require much more pressure, so they are less comfortable for lengthy writing, and it's more difficult to write neatly.
Children in some countries are therefore still required to use fountain pens at school.
(Thankfully it was just a short lived fad and they all gathered dust in storage fairly quickly.)
If I had to sit with just a notebook, and listen to the class only, I'd rapidly become sidetracked and check completely out. Then when it came to writing things down that were important, I'd have to check back in, and quickly jot things down that were illegible.
Massively improved my retention, and overall ability to function in class.
The "no computers, computers bad" mentality in schools is a major limiting factor for people with different learning styles, and neurodivergent children.
(This is a genuine question) What were the benefits of being in class if you're basically doing something else and not actively listening?
Compared with, say, sitting in the library (or indeed at home), working on the same thing, without the potential distraction of what the rest of your class was doing?
It's just a different learning style. I'm actively listening, but in a more passive way than normal, if that makes any sense.
> Compared with, say, sitting in the library (or indeed at home), working on the same thing, without the potential distraction of what the rest of your class was doing?
In University I'd often skip class specifically to do this. Worked far better for me than sitting in a lecture hall. Let me work at my own pace, take breaks, walk around, ect. Classes with mandatory attendance were the bane of my existence. Intentionally designing courses to require attendance by not providing complete notes, or incomplete textbooks, also caused me issues.
In school I spent many (un)happy hours gazing out of the windows of the class due to sheer boredom.
Q: Are you able to comment on how the pace of learning is for you? Too slow / just right / too fast?
Once I got to University my learning style quickly evolved into "take notes on everything the lecturer said", with pen and paper. Hard to tune out of a lecture when you are literally writing everything down, at speed.
For me at least it was definitely a most effective way of learning (and then revising). Writing stuff out, over and over and over again.
The issue here is what I mentioned above: illegible handwriting. The more pressure I am under, the higher my stress levels, the harder is becomes to take clear notes. In these situations I would end up with incomplete, illegible, useless, scrawl on pages.
> Are you able to comment on how the pace of learning is for you? Too slow / just right / too fast?
All over the map, really. The lack of consistent tempo in most lectures was the issue. If the class was too slow: zoning out, forgetting to take down critical parts. If the class was too quick: overwhelmed, unable to take clear usable notes. The duration of a class was always too long as well, but that's not just a me issue. Empirically, there's a infinite amount of time that someone can stay actively engaged. I don't recall exactly how long, but I do remember all university lectures lasted very generously longer than that.
My highest scores in class were always courses where there was an excellent textbook (or where I had found a supplemental textbook), or where I could effectively teach myself the material. IE: philosophy courses where, instead of attending, I could just read the selected writer's works. One of my highest marks was in a class I never once attended.
Hard to actually consume the contents of a lecture when you are frantically trying to reproduce a powerpoint slide and transcript of what someone is saying in real time.
I would postulate that for the majority of people, in the majority of learning situations, writing out notes could (should?) be an integral part of consuming the contents of a lecture.
There's a 2021 paper from the University of Tokyo entitled "Paper Notebooks vs. Mobile Devices: Brain Activation Differences During Memory Retrieval"[0] which is worth reading.
NB: this obviously won't (can't) work for everyone.
Making a hand written transcript of every word said - like a court stenographer is not necessarily listening or consuming the things said, especially when they are new or challenging concepts that require the student to apply some critical thinking or form connections with other knowledge.
(In England your teacher would ask the school's special education teacher for advice. You might end up with a laptop, or something else that helps, essentially on prescription from an educational psychologist. Class teachers would be given guidance on when and how you can or should use it.)
> In England your teacher would ask the school's special education teacher for advice
In Canada, they just said I wasn't trying hard enough. I can't count the number of times people fought me tooth and nail to prevent me learning in the way that suited me best. You would like to assume that teachers and school administrators are looking for the best way to educate people, but sadly that's not always the case. It often breaks down into a bureaucracy of "well, you don't have xyz condition, and we only allow this for xyz condition, so you don't get it." Another one I got was "we won't let you have a laptop because we're liable if it gets broken".
Some process is inevitable when your needs are far outside the norm and have the potential to disrupt the education of the rest of the class.
(I can't comment on the situation in Canada.)
I see it as similar to being left-handed in the 1800's. Eventually we're going to see that the approach we're taking now is just as nonsensical. We're essentially beating the devil out of children now by forcing them to adopt a learning approach that was developed over a hundred years ago when there was no other way.
I think you're error here is in assuming that you will be given what you need if you simply ask for it in school. I assure you, this is not the case. In many cases, I've had teachers (and later profs) explicitly go out of their way to exempt themselves from having to provide any accommodations at all. Even when supplying them was legally mandated by provincial government. One sticks out in my memory as having quite literally saying "then sue me" when I was refused an accommodation specifically required in my student file.
At the latest since become a parent and having school-age kids it's become patently clear to me that this isn't what school administrators or the indeed the vast majority of teachers are looking for at all.
Umm, not sure whether I agree with this.
Don't we expect children to learn basic mathematics without access to a calculator? This despite the fact that there are certainly children who struggle with laborious long multiplication and division. Our eldest was one of them!
If you provide someone with a calculator, there's no need for them to learn how to do basic math. If you provide someone who can write with a computer, you're just altering how the information is retained, not what information is retained.
> I'm not advocating not teaching people to write, I'm suggesting we do that, but then provide them the option to use a computer to assist their learning
Q1a: What would we say is the purpose of young people learning to write unaided, with just pencil and paper?
Q1b: At what point do we say "OK, that's enough basic knowledge", and we let them reach for an electronic device to assist?
and
Q2a: What would we say is the purpose of learning to do mathematics unaided, with just pencil and paper?
Q2b: At what point do we say "OK, that's enough basic knowledge", and we let them reach for an electronic device to assist?
I'm not sure that I see that there's much difference between the two.
In both cases, there will come a time when you don't have your device (or its charger) handy, and you will have a significant advantage if you can manage the task in front of you without electronic assistance.
We didn't have laptops back then. Now when I do learn, with the benefit of experience and technology, it's a mix of videos + active research / googling. And I often enough just leave educational videos running in the background while doing something a little more mindless if I'm not in the mood to fully pay attention.
People learn differently. I want to stress this: There really are different types of learners, and applying one method to everybody means some people lose out. That said (and this is completely anecdotal), the smartest hands-on "easily distracted" learners I know run massive circles all the meticulous book learners I know.
You get it -- this is exactly what I'm getting at. The second issue here is that many people grow up thinking they're bad at a lot of things, when in reality they just were bad at learning it in the prescribed way.
My favorite example is the one computer science course I took, I failed. And I failed it hard. This was a course in a programming language I'd been actively using for a year, as a contractor, working in data engineering. Needless to say, I was baffled.
I spent half my life convinced that I was bad at mathematics. My math grades in high school dropped sharply the second we hit algebra, and they never really recovered. When I decided to reorient my studies towards programming approaching my mid 20s, this led to me missing some HS prerequisites. Long story short, we have 3 levels of math classes in the last two grades of high school here, I passed the mid-level of 4th grade, needed mid-level of 5th grade at least. So I enrolled in remote HS for this one class.
All it took was me sitting down with the teacher once and grilling him with all my questions for everything I misunderstood as a teen to finally click. Working on exercises on my own terms, and actually having the opportunity to understand _why_ things work the way they do rather than just learning obscure formulas and applying them, let me realize "well shit, this stuff's actually easy". I aced the class, got my prerequisite, and got in my CS program. The rest is history, I've now been working for almost 7 years, stepped up from junior to leading my own team.
I'd wager I'm far from alone in this situation. The one-size-fits-all approach to education is IMHO doing more harm than good.
I can only speak for myself, but back in school, I've always found actively listening in to class to be extremely laborious. There was seemingly just no way for me to focus on someone talking without additional stimulation for more than 20-30 minutes at a time. I typically just read the teacher's slides or was done grasping the base concept faster than the rest of the class, then lost focus the second things started to get repeated or re-explained for other students. Bringing in a laptop helped me stay focused as I could Google stuff the teacher/speaker talked about, tag my notes, insert links as relevant, etc. Basically, it let me go at my own pace rather than forcing the class' pace on me. I could use the time to do further research on the subject as I was taking my notes instead of relying on me going back to them (which realistically never happened).
In the end, it turned out to be undiagnosed ADHD/PI, for which I've now been getting treated for the last 6 months (which helps tremendously!). Not pretending like it would be beneficial for all kids, but there's a case to be made that not everyone learns in the same way.
I used a laptop full time in school from 16-18 (and then at university too) and found it much more productive. My notes were better and more usable.
For younger children I think everyone agrees that it's important to be teaching computer skills, and that requires computers. Having rooms of desktop computers is arguably outdated, and a poor use of space, so many schools have switched to trolleys of shared laptops.
Additionally there's a problem with computer access for homework. Many households don't have a computer suitable for homework, so by giving every child a laptop, schools can (theoretically) rely on everyone having a basic level of equipment available.
Is this perfect? No, it takes some effort to do, but given modern remote management tools I'd expect not a lot more than traditional IT provisioning at schools. Should kids get one from day 1 in kindergarten? Probably not, but during primary school could be reasonable.
Or is it that you think parents should be teaching this—which guarantees it's only going to be taught to the children of the reasonably well-off?
Welcome to the 21st century, where it's widely beneficial for everyone to know how to use computers at least at a basic level, and skills like "how to use simple Excel formulas" are often enough on their own to get people decent-paying office jobs. Because the people already working there were never taught how to use computers in any systematic way beyond, maybe, "keyboarding classes".
Where many governments require forms of various types to be submitted online, and only put out many kinds of information on their websites.
Where it's nearly a guarantee that people are going to be using social media, no matter how much you try to restrict them, so it's a damn good idea to teach them how to recognize misinformation and other kinds of manipulation (not strictly a computer skill, but definitely related).
I'm not talking about kids. I'm saying those kids will grow up, and once they grow up, they will almost certainly be on social media.
If they are not taught about critical thinking, media literacy, and how to recognize manipulations and misinformation while they are still in school, they will be easy prey for all the various kinds of sharks out there.
Nevertheless promoters don't generally want to get rid of traditional teaching tools. Just add digital tools as part of the learning experience.
And contrary to most popular believe, kids don't want to be all the time with the computers.
Yes, teaching computer skills is important, but crippling their writing and adding a tool into the classroom which can steal their focus faster than anything else is not a productive way to do it.
Have classes which needs computers, and classes which ban them during class hours. Being able to focus on a piece of paper with a pen or pencil is equally important.
Writing improves cognitive skills, thinking, retention, and more. I still design software on paper prior to implementing it, and I can see the whole thing much clearer and better.
Every person should have computer skills and access to a computer, yes, but they should be able to work without them, too.
Otherwise, we'll also realize The Foundation series from Asimov. We'll lose the essence which allows us to create and understand these things in the first place.
I do the same thing.
I don’t know whether laptops in school are bad for children, but you can’t really make that comparison.
Personally, my belief is that children should learn to use computers (I did as a child, and it was massively beneficial) but that computers should not be central to their foundational education.
Kids shouldn’t learn basic arithmetic on a computer. They should learn it with their hands, with things they can hold, and by writing.
Computers can come later when the math is far more advanced.
Another thought: "learning with their hands, with things they can hold" is nice to say, but counting blocks/geometry boards/etc are actually rather expensive (hard to have as many sets as there are kids, for several reasons), so often kids will only get a short amount of time to experience such things, rather than being able to use them as a thinking aid whenever they want until they grow out of the need for them. On the other hand, presuming each child has a computer, "learning by interactive example" — i.e. having interactive touch-enabled simulations of these same learning toys — is almost as good, and freely scalable to the entire student population, such that each child gets as much time to experiment with the simulation — and really learn the lesson of it — as they want. Including taking it home with them!
A third thought, perhaps less persuasive because I'm an outlier, but personally meaningful to me: back in the 90s, I learned PEDMAS before parentheses were even taught to us in school. I had grabbed "C for Dummies" from a grocery-store shelf — asking my mum to purchase it for me — because I knew that C was how you made video games. Instead, I ended up reading about "operator precedence" / "operator binding affinity" as a general concept. Yes, I was 9; yes, most of what I read flew right over my head. But that part stuck! And when I later — at the age of 11 — learned PHP and then Ruby, I already understood how to translate math on a page into syntax for a REPL, because I had seen the C example of how to write binding-precedence parsing. And then I did start creating (simple) game demos — and more interestingly, from-scratch game engines to power them (because toolkits like Unity weren't a thing back then), which involved more than a little bit of maths to make even the simplest physics integration steps work. (Yes, this means I understood how acceleration translates to velocity and then displacement — and so had an intuitive grasp of integrals, despite never having been exposed to them — when I was 12. I came into my pre-calc and physics classes prepared!)
There is some evidence to suggest that writing does help retain information, as multiple functions of the brain are being engaged with the same information. Whether that extends to typing and using a computer I do not know.
> Another thought: "learning with their hands, with things they can hold" is nice to say, but counting blocks/geometry boards/etc are actually rather expensive (hard to have as many sets as there are kids, for several reasons), so often kids will only get a short amount of time to experience such things, rather than being able to use them as a thinking aid whenever they want until they grow out of the need for them.
That's a failure of the education system, not an argument in favor of computers in the classroom. That problem is solvable without computers.
Lastly, kids learning how to use computers is a good thing, I do believe. I do not, however, believe that learning on computers should replace other forms of learning, especially for foundational skills.
There's a good amount of evidence for a difference. Example study (of which there are many): https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210319080820.h...
"A study of university students and recent graduates has revealed that writing on physical paper can lead to more brain activity when remembering the information an hour later. Researchers say that the unique, complex, spatial and tactile information associated with writing by hand on physical paper is likely what leads to improved memory."
I'm not saying you can't teach kids math on a computer, I'm saying I believe it's better not to.
I think basic computer access at home and for homework is a pretty convincing reason. And I do agree that kids should learn to write with a pen and do maths without a calculator (/computer).
It's easy enough to give some classes chromebooks, while others don't have chromebooks, and see who gets higher test scores.
Then keep track of those people, and see who does better at university, and who ends up earning more, having a bigger house, or living longer - just to confirm that those people really end up doing better, rather than just doing well on the test.
Not only that. We are promoting to our kids a fully proprietary system that increasingly becomes a walled garden, run by an aggressive imperialist company with abysmal technical support, with a complete failure in parental control practices. It is, at least with our school, completely impossible to implement parental controls on enrolled Chromebooks, so you have to trust the school's policy which is, in many cases, inadequate. The school's solution - well, take the Chromebook away at home. Good luck with that.
Chromebook pushes the agenda of Google cloud and Google apps on the user. Millions of people are grown into this world assuming the only option for them to perform functions or access their own data is to be online and use the cloud. This is as close to a digital dystopia as I can imagine.
I don't like what Google has become and I would never buy a Google Chromebook. Forcing this in schools so early (11-years old here in the UK) is a crime we're all committing. We all are going to pay for it.
Parental control is bullcrap anyway - and at least for parents of my age, complete hypocrisy to boot. We turned out generally fine despite having active trade networks at school for everything... warez, games, movies no matter their rating, copious amounts of porn, shocker sites, whatnot. I remember the debates about how shooter games would turn us all into killers after Columbine (in the US) and Erfurt (2002)/Emsdetten (2006)/Winnenden (2009) in Germany, and yet... at least German kids grew up perfectly normal, and amok incidents remain a rarity [1] in Germany.
The only ones pushing for "parental control" are religious fundamentalist parents not realizing just how backwards they are. And for the Americans: ffs instead of blaming shooter games for mass shootings, maybe invest into mental health services, bullying prevention and actual gun control. Your society has a massive problem with violence, but shooter games are not a part of it at all.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Amokl%C3%A4ufen_an_B...
Since then, though, multi-hundred-billion dollar corporations have arisen that employ vast quantities of employees (including psychologists) tasked with obtaining and keeping your attention on their content and the surrounding advertising empires.
It's not quite the same setup we had to deal with.
So limiting access is investing in mental health.
> After 1 h/day of use, more hours of daily screen time were associated with lower psychological well-being, including less curiosity, lower self-control, more distractibility, more difficulty making friends, less emotional stability, being more difficult to care for, and inability to finish tasks.
Learning to think on the computer is a useful skill and 6th graders US (11 year olds are year 7 in UK) have had half a decade of paper instruction. So making the jump at 11 is perfectly reasonable.
Chromebook is simply cheap to buy and manage. The point of these is a simple tool, little different than a calculator. If Google offends you feel free to sell Linux laptops, just understand schools don’t want to spend anything managing computers.
I wish Chromebook was only a calculator at school, but kids do research, write essays, projects, solve puzzles - pretty much the whole homework process is now moving online. Instead of really thinking and planning, you're clicking buttons, writing WYSIWYG and drag'n'dropping things around. That's not how we've learnt, and research says there is evidence that inhibits cognitive development. Folks really on top in SV are perfectly aware of that, of course.
What's horrific, also, is that all this is heavily subsidized by vendors like Google. They know they're investing into raising a user base, so open solutions have no chance of competing, not to mention being ready for the task.
This is radically different from microcomputers, the Apple IIs, ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s that boosted our generation.
This suggest that really thinking and planning can't happen while doing these things. I understand the concern, but I'm not entirely convinced that's true.
Once upon a time they said the same thing about paper. There was a time when kids wrote on sand or clay because paper was far to expensive. When ballpoints came along someone probably stood up and said that it was wrong for kids to use them as cutting and maintaining quills was an essential skill, that the easy use of ballpoints meant that children would not be so careful about their writing. (When I was in grade school, our desks had holes for ink wells.) Then came calculators and teachers moaned about how kids would loose the necessary skill that was long division. Then electronic encyclopedias, and one of my teachers complained about how Encarta made it too easy to skip between articles, as opposed to walking around the library. And it the back of every arts collage sits an aging film professor bemoaning how digital editing has disrupted the "tried and true" skill of splicing film reals together onto platters.
The same is true for computers. Most people may stumble through doing their taxes, can watch YouTube, and figure out email but they aren’t fluent. If I asked you what the current light speed delay between earth and Saturn is right now you could probably find out it’s somewhere between 87.66 and 71.02 minutes in a few seconds. But, finding it was 1 hours, 29 minutes and 36.6430 seconds from earth as I write this involved more effort and having some idea where to look.
You might not think of that as computer literacy, but people need to know how to do more than just the GUI on a WYSIWTG editor to actually write a good essay.
Same here.
Carpentry is a skill that needs to be trained. Using the tools safely and optimally isn't something that most raw beginners will be able to figure out on their own.
But computers: barring issues of socioeconomic status preventing access to them, the kids will do alright on their own.
Carpentry a great analogy as you can learn the basic skills to build a perfectly functional house in a few weeks. However, you can literally spend a lifetime mastering it. So, let’s not pretend the bare minimum of computer literacy is all there is to know.
Anti Vax people for example have fundamental issues with knowing how to utilize computer technology. They where ill prepared to separate fact from FUD and it’s causing real problems. Having 11 year olds writing papers that get graded is a great way to transition kids from basic literacy into mastery.
Chromebooks are the baking soda equivalent in middle school school chemistry experiments. Cheap and instructive is considered good enough.
and for a lot of us geeks let's be super clear: it's a happy accident that all that time networking, overclocking, and modding our computers to play quake (or whatever) paid off. A lot of the most 'prepared for the real world' hacker news crowd could have benefitted from greater offline / social / artistic endeavors, including myself.
That isn't to say kids shouldn't have access to computers in school, only that prepping a kid for an information economy is not, can not, and should not be the only purpose of education.
Instead, they catered to the same jackasses who featurespec'd SharePoint. Missed opportunity.
>> {enable developer mode}
If it were sandboxed, that's shouldn't be something it's possible for managed administrators to disable.
No one would play TI-83 games if they had other options... but it'd be hard to say writing and modifying them wasn't educational.
And even if all of those issues could be resolved, like somehow making a Linux tablet with handwriting recognition and only open-source software (or whatever, I don't actually think it would be anywhere close to sufficient)...
The educational software is just garbage. Math and reading games that allow way too much guessing. "Science" games that basically amount to a skinned version of Super Mario Bros, literally still just collecting coins, so you can then buy pictures of animals in the game. But it's got that Wild Kratz licensing! Don't forget to purchase the books!
And it's the same thing, over and over again.
Maybe the problem is not the computer but the broader cultural and technological maturity. I bet with teaching methods directed at information technology (multimodal, interactive text books) and proper learning and attention management skills on the student's end, we could see an increase in learning capacity.
Agree 100% on the detriment of using proprietary, closed source software. As an educator you have a responsibility to not vendor-lock your students and strengthen monopolies. Proprietary software should be outlawed when FOSS alternatives are available. You should be teaching skills and concepts not specific tools anyway.
I bet both of these go the other way:
* While some rich and powerful people are anti-screen, I expect it's more common for them to want their kids using computers in school so they're better prepared.
* Private schools are more likely to have laptops and other tech, because they can afford it. While you get the occasional story about a fancy school that is trying to minimize tech, "poor school has no laptops because they're too expensive" doesn't make the news.
When I grew up in the 90s, every school was dominated by Apple computers, and Apple's walled garden made it so if you didn't have an Apple computer at home to work on homework, you were basically fucked if you wanted to work on or print anything at school. Switching to Chromebooks is exactly what let kids escape from walled gardens, so then they could work on homework using any computer with a web browser.
It's a dual-edged sword, IMHO. I fully agree that writing by hand feels very different both in terms of the ability to take notes while paying attention to someone else AND seems to promote better thought and recall.
Devices can have a benefit, though. My 15 year old w/ADHD has constantly struggled with note taking and test preparation. What he's recently found that works well is to create online quizzes based on study materials. It keeps him engaged since it's more active, plus the act of creating the quizzes themselves runs the information through his brain.
All that said, I agree on the dangers of the walled garden and that technical, privacy, or other issues will certainly lead to cases where the technology becomes a distraction, even when used as intended.
This is something my wife and I have been discussing. We’re planning on homeschooling our children, which means we’ll get to dictate how much screen exposure they’ll get.
I’m convinced that these devices are only making us dumber — sure, on one hand, we (most folks in society today) can be more efficient, but on the other hand, we struggle with retaining even some of the most basic information due to our strong dependence on technology.
As a computer nerd, my home is obviously filled with computers and related devices, but I don’t want my children growing up in an environment where everyone around them is dependent on technology to survive.
I don't see why you would want to sabotage the next generation by denying them access to the tools which would be available to them in the workplace.
Yeah, we really exchanged one for the other. Previously it was all Microsoft Windows and Office, as a lonely IT enthusiast in a smaller city, I haven't even known about Linux or any other alternatives right until university. I wish free software was the standard, in education and government alike.
Our eldest has had a school-issue iPad, along with the rest of his class, for a couple of years now.
As a parent I'd suggest that, despite being basically issued "for free", they're a very mixed blessing, since they were given out I can count on one hand the number of pieces of work his class have done on the iPad where the device was of benefit.
The number of times my son has reported one of his classmates getting into trouble due to messing about on iPad in class easily numbers in the hundreds...
If the school decided to take all the iPads away tomorrow I wouldn't be bothered in the slightest.
The expectation was that you already know a lot about computer usage. And people who did not learned that before were treated like idiots.
And to add to it, those who had access to computer only in class were super behind those who had free access to it.
Both elementary and high schools should and do teach those things. I don't know how they are supposed to teach that without school related access to computer.
Having your basic education be dependent on the most complicated tech in existence seems a bit too much for me. I don't think 5nm chips made in Taiwan are the best way to teach a kid what division is and who Napoleon was.
Students have been using laptops in schools for nearly 20 years.
Typically, in a high school / college context, where study habits have already formed to some extent. My kids' middle school gave everyone a laptop, and it's been constant whack-a-mole for the teachers (YouTube, Fortnite, Reddit, etc.). I wish they'd get rid of them.
Besides, as our societies transform more and more into service sector economies based on IT services and media transforms as well (with the shift from traditional gatekeeper TV/radio/newspapers to Youtube/podcasts/a ton of services), it is imperative that children from a young age learn how to properly interact with computers and digital society. We're already seeing kids unable to judge the quality of online media sources, for example.
I can’t even imagine being a kid in school these days with an off brand smartphone or ipods, especially when Apple actively promotes bullying non users.
For primary school I might agree with you, but not for secondary school.
I started taking meeting notes on a succession of Palm and then Compaq handhelds before I bought my first Tablet PC with OneNote in 2005. It was a tremendously valuable tool both professionally and academically. For example, this is a page of notes from a Tandberg certification class I took in 2006:
Sharing my notes was trivial. I could print to PDF and email to the rest of my team in a minute. Organizing my notes was equally simple. It's been nearly two decades, and I was able to locate these notes in seconds. Even though they're handwritten, OneNote can index my notes. It's pretty amazing.
Around the same time, I took an ITIL certification class. The teacher was someone like you, and he demanded we put away our computers for class. I'd love to share with you the detailed notes I took, but they're buried somewhere in a drawer full of paper notebooks. It'd probably take me an hour or two to locate those notes, scan them, and upload them somewhere. My employer spent thousands on that class, but if I have ITIL questions in my various IT operations roles, I have to google reference material instead of using what I created for myself. It's such a ridiculous waste of time and effort that it still frustrates me, ~15 years later.
_However_, I’m a little more ambivalent knowing that most of them do that to look at naked ladies, presumably. Maybe create pictures of naked ladies (again: very impressed by Generative AI, with the caveat that it’s widely used for pr0n)
That doesn’t feel ideal for the emotional maturation of middle-schooler. In my time ::shakes fists at cloud::, hacking the school network meant you risk exposing yourself to people with strong opinions about plot points in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Nowadays, it also means risking ending on a psyops from Russian secret service, whatever Andrew Tate is (and please, don’t tell me: that’s one shred of innocence I want to keep) or, inexplicable, worse. I remember ridiculing music producers who were saying that if you didn’t pay for CDs, you would end up empowering “pedonazis”. That felt ridiculous at the time. It feels less so now, both not paying for music and enabling actual pedophiles and actual nazis by sticking blindly to open-web principles.
I am very happy that the kids stick it to the man. I feel like we grey manes need to put our heads together and think about how we talk to them about emotional maturation, bad people, and safely exploring. It will sound ridiculous coming from the generation that cared about Facebook, but I feel like we can’t just stand in the bleachers and clap every time the JV red team scores a point.
Not really, porn and gore were integral parts of the internet even "back then". Rotten.com launched in 1996 for example, Ogrish at 2000. Eating disorders are also fluorishing in the current era, on TikTok for one, but I remember the pro-ana websites from my youth as well, distributed on private websites, because creating a website or blog was easy. It was also very easy to find porn, even if specific websites were banned on your network, because it was just everywhere. Peer to peer networks also happily distrubuted whatever, let that be gore, hardcore porn, or any illegal thing you can think of, including abuse material.
I do agree about your conclusion though. Emotional maturation, strong connection to people matter a lot, and a lot of the horrors are created specifically when these are missing from one's life.
The first time I got called to the office was as a freshman in high school for fixing the 4 computer lab computers another kid had borked. That was Windows 3.0 and there was no network. The vice principal sat us down together and said the other kid was headed for a life of trouble and should be more like me. It was his considered opinion that I would go on to solve computer problems for a living and get paid $100,000. Honestly, I was way more impressed with him than myself. Unfortunately I went to medical school and never got to solve other people's computer problems for money. I mean, I solve computer problems for people, I get paid, but those two events are thoroughly decoupled.
I now have a 17 year old and a 21 year old. I think they are more aware of their maturity level than I was. They sit around and think of what they are probably capable of doing. Which is a level of introspection I rarely have even today.
lol. In my time, hacking the school network meant you could access programs that belonged to other schools, or print to their printers. And that was pretty much it.
Wouldn’t parents set up something similar when they first get a contract for their kids? If I had mine on by default, wouldn’t they insist on having one?