Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark
theprivacydad.com
theprivacydad.com
The amount of incompetence is beyond reason.
My daughter(12)'s keyboard got broken, now she is afraid she wont be able to take her exam with an external keyboard because there is a spyware extension they use called 'safe exam browser' that might block her computer when she plugs the keyboard.
Most of the kids are just using it to snapchat during class.
I will honestly prefer to just ban all tech from schools.
The digital devices harm learning. Sweden will spend 60 million for reintroducing actual books, focus on actual reading and writing (important for learning and motoric ability).
I’m not surprised. While I’m sceptic about many positions of Manfred Spitzer [2] (University of Ulm) I’m afraid that he is right in many areas. A tablet is not the tool to discover the world for a child. They need to view, touch, smell and focus on matters.
Putting aside that Apple (iPad), Google (Chromebook) and Microsoft (Surface) just want to train child’s to depend on their stuff forever. We can still introduce computers at the age of 12 and the kids will adapt - and teach required basics (control your data, understand technic on high level, touch-typing, how you can access knowledge…and that a lot of companies and people are hostile).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/11/sweden-says-ba...
Your remark about the suppliers wanting to get the kids "hooked" on their products isn't new btw, this was happening 20+ years ago already with MS Office and co.
I hope this becomes a trend! I’ve always hated the idea of being dependent on electronic devices during school.
He wants handwriting and books back in the classrooms.
In my experience, what ended up happening was that pupils who already knew their way around a computer didn't really get any extra benefit from using cmputers in the classroom and those who didn't like using computers hated it even more when forced to write out an assignment on a keyboard as supposed to handwriting.
Most importantly though, they were a HUGE distraction. Any time the lesson got boring because the teacher wasn't good or just not good at getting the kids engaged in the lesson (which happened quite often sadly, but that is another discussion) we would all just start playing on the computers. Some kids came to school just to play videogames and barely learned anything.
Now, some of these issues (like bad professors, smart kids getting bored because of slow pace of lessons) have always been present in every school all over the world but I do think that having tech in the classroom just makes things worse, as now even those who would have normally followed the lesson are tempted to just turn on their computer and pretend to take notes when really they are playing Candy crush. It's bad enough being a teenager and being bombarded with stimuli from your phone and social media, having that kind of distraction at school just makes things even worse.
So yeah, I think tech in school is one of those things that sounds great but usually just back-fires in spectacular ways (imho).
But envy is one of the most powerful forces in politics, even when it doesn't make sense. So the idea that children in Namibia were getting laptops, while kids in Virginia weren't — even though it was a money-saving trick — that was just unacceptable. And unlike in the OLPC, schools bought laptops from a variety of vendors, mostly interested in upselling lots of unnecessary features rather than providing a lightweight textbook device. Anyone familiar with the history of the TI-83 understands that corporations selling technology to schools are the lowest form of life.
I can't say for sure that this is what caused it, but it was right around the time that laptops started showing up in schools, and also when the concept of the "netbook" was introduced. The early netbooks certainly seemed to be imitating that weird green blob-shaped thing that OLPC hoped would revolutionize education in the less developed world.
Relevant:
Morgan G. Ames
The Charisma Machine
The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child
> https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537445/the-charisma-machine/
I would not fault computers here. At my school time, when pupils were bored, they covertly played card games like Skat [a German card game] or graph paper games like Battleship, Racetrack, Connect Four, ... under the school desks.
I still remember this one girl who, when the teacher confiscated one deck of Skat cards, the moment that the teacher looked away, simply took out another deck from her school bag, and play continued (she played Skat semi-competitively, so she nearly always had, I think, dozens of decks of Skat cards in her school bag).
Another former friend had an insane creativity in turning stuff that one could find in a pencil case into contraptions for shooting rubber pieces.
Technology changes over time, humans don't.
Yea bored kids have always found ways to entertain themselves in class. But this is a matter of scale.
Kids being able to covertly play battleship on pen and paper is many steps removed from every kid in the class being constantly plugged into a network where the wealthiest companies in the world are spending billions of dollars competing for their attention.
Kids with unfettered access to the internet in the classroom might as well be sitting in a casino.
i.e. "Word processing only" "specific website(s) only" etc
I'm aware that actually implementing this in a fool-proof way is non-trivial - but would it in theory solve the issue and allow the benefits of tech?
I can't imagine taking notes by hand any more.
In my experience, pupils are insanely creative in getting around such restrictions: pupils have a lot of time, and in each grade there is this one guy (nearly always male) who combines being knowledgeable in computer topics, and having subversive traits (if not in the grade, there exists someone who has a big brother with these traits who will have a lot of fun helping his little brother to destroy the digital cage). Once a way is found, in a few days it has spread around the schoolyward.
Whether they like it is not is secondary; did they learn to use the machine? Because some amount of ability to use computers is rather important in the modern world.
Where did they say laptops introduced the concept of distraction to school?
What you did was reiterate the same point that @caldarons had already made themselves in the paragraph immediately following the one you are now quoting.
Also, it's hypocritical to mock @caldarons for your failure to understand what they wrote, while also blaming the people who reply to you for not understanding what you write.
While IT skills are important and should be taught at schools, please do it in the traditional fashion; have a computer lab, make everything abuse resistant, and get a favorable repair / maintenance contract.
We have a 15 year old that managed to destroy 3 or 4 laptops and four phones in the span of five years.
My kid’s elementary school policy for iPad damage was $100 for the first damage, $250 for the second, $500 for the third.
This was problematic for a few reasons: 1) they didn’t have anyone to debug devices in a school of 1000 kids, so any problem was damage and parents were fined; 2) the iPad was several years old and costs $300 to just buy; 3) if the iPad was stolen then the full $500 was due; 4) they wouldn’t provide cases and asked the parents to purchase only specific cases and any other cases were removed. Their approved cases weren’t very good; 5) location tracking was turned on even outside of schools.
When I tried to talk with the administration they said something like “this is as good as we can do.” They said that it was mandatory for kids to use these devices. I bought my kid their own iPad refurbed for 289 or something with AppleCare for $7/month and used that for 3 years of elementary school. Arguing with the admin every year when they tried to say this wasn’t allowed.
Thankfully, my primary education was before computer tech in schools or I'd have been sidetracked by the technology and it's pretty certain I'd have learned much less. Even by that age I was fascinated by electronic stuff and invariably I'd have pull it apart or tested it to destruction.
Right, had I had the tech I'd have lost out on two accounts, not only would I have been distracted by it but I'd have likely lost it or rendered it useless by the time exams came around. Not having the compulsory tech necessary for exams would have added further unecessary stress and distraction.
If you're trying to teach IT to students, have a tech lab. If the students need to watch something, it can be done with a projector.
I now know that I never needed one. If a teacher uses the Socratic method, I learn very effectively as long as the dialogue is engaging. Note taking slows me down and doesn’t allow to me fully process what has been said. I always had to spend a large amount of time reviewing the notes after class and realized how much didn’t soak in when I was taking them.
The issue was, far too many teachers would add one random bit of trivia into a quick sentence they said and use that as a question on the next exam. Even if that bit of knowledge wasn’t in the related books or could be naturally deduced by understanding the topic.
The best teachers I had didn’t require me to use laptops. I realize that now that I am attending Greek school as an adult and only use a small notepad to take quick notes on something to follow up with later like vocab to add to Anki. A class of 12 engaged in dialogue is far more effective for myself.
Everyone else is pen and paper, shared computer labs, and home computers shared by all family kids.
I can't quite recall if this was before the covid outbreak, but I think we still had in person classes that year.
Honestly, I hated taking notes in lectures (and considered the necessity for it to be a distraction from paying full attention). On the other hand, there were these students who live-LaTeXed math lectures on their laptops ...
I'd suggest very few could actually do that successfully. First, they'd have to be truly fluent touch typists—that is being able to keep their eyes fully focused on the lecturer and being fully fluent in LaTeX.
And I'd suggest that's a very tall order if say the lecture was on math or physics—say on a topic such as the Navier–Stokes equations. Not only would their eyes be focused on the lecturer and what he/she's writing on the blackboard but they'd have to be sufficiently fluent in LaTeX math to enter rows of partial differential equations on-the-fly and be completely wordperfect about it.
No doubt there will be a few exceptional people who can perform such a feat but I'd bet the number would be miniscule.
Edit: when I was taking lecture notes I'd often resort to transcribing lectures from recordings to get the stuff that I missed or that wasn't clear at the time of the lecture. Unfortunately, back then there were very few video recordings of lectures which meant that transcribing math, physics etc. was essentially out of the question.
There were however audio cassette recording of subjects where visuals were less important such as philosophy. Even with these subjects I found that transcribing the audio into coherent notes was timeconsuming and difficult and often it required me to replay sections of the tape over and over. This was worthwhile as it drove the lectures home but it was damn hard work.
They do a lot of phonics in my kids class. She finished all her phonics lessons early in the year, so now she just uses that time to read a few chapter book chapters instead that I send with her to school, which is much more relevant than just doing extra phonics anyway (that's another story though).
I can't fathom while you'd use anyone's personal device to take tests, though. What could possibly be taught to a 12 year old that couldn't be tested in the form of a written exam? It's always the tyrannical anti cheat software that turns any good idea into a terrible experience.
If we are talking about high schools and mainly technical high schools banning tech is contrary to the point of the school. I think a balanced view is better: carrying laptops on classes where you need them and also adapt classes if laptop could be beneficial.
Even in elementary school, my child has robotics.
In general, I think politicians use binary yes/no options because they are lazy and/or incapable of working or thinking harder.
Apart from lessons directly about computing and/or technology - of which there may be a handful of hours per week in a regular highschool - the number of subjects which "need a laptop" in high school is vanishingly small.
> politicians use binary yes/no options because they are lazy and/or incapable of working or thinking harder
Lobbyists don't even use binary. They're always pushing their product.
My old high school used the LabPro/LoggerPro platform for that, and it became a core part of how physics and chemistry was taught. https://www.vernier.com/product/labpro/
The former is essential to a modern economy and way of life.
The latter is road to laziness, poor mental health and terrible learning outcomes.
No electronics. TV, Radio...
Are there any believable success story for this from involved people (= students+teachers+parents)?
As a happy side effect it also had a BASIC interpreter, which I would absolutely use to distract myself in boring lessons. I've been a professional software developer more or less since I left school. Not sure what the lesson is there... give kids laptops but only allow text editors and compilers?
"...for anything that involved writing it made the world of difference."
No doubt what you say is true but it's odd as research has shown that using a keyboard requires additional cognition and thus usually more is learned when taking handwritten notes specifically because it's less mentally taxing. If I recall there was research to this effect on an HN story in the last week or so.
It would be interesting to know why the opposite seems to be so with you.
Possibly given sufficient focus on practicing handwriting that would have worked as well but several years of near constant handwriting in school never got to that point, while 30-60 minutes a day of practice at typing had me able to beat the speed I could handwrite at within a month or two.
You're very lucky indeed that your parents encouraged you to type, clearly it's put you in good stead.
My mother had been a professional typist and stenographer and knew Pitman shorthand to a tee. She could type multiple pages without a single mistake for she learned in the days before wordprocessors and correction fluid—a single mistake would mean retyping the whole page. Also, she worked in a law firm where cross-outs and corrections were just not acceptable. Simply, she had to be accurate and word-perfect every time and she was.
Yet at no time did she take the time to teach me to type nor teach me shorthand. It's not as if she wouldn't have done so had she known better but it just wasn't acceptable to teach boys what was then considered women's work.
This is one big regret of my life as my typing is at best still scratchy and I do not know shorthand which in hindsight would have been a godsend.
I need to correct my point about handwriting and learning. I'm now not sure whether the story was linked from HN or not but it's definitely on Sabine Hossenfelder's Science News YouTube channel here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7PQbidoBPBc
one commander x16 per child :)
But can one really hope, to prepare students for life then?
Then due to fear of drug labs and terrorism, those largely became relics of a better past.
Computers are normal in everyday life and allmost every job. Whether it is research, or writing or programming - artificially seperating students from such a integral part of modern life seems not that practical. At least not, if the goal is to raise the general level of computer savviness - which I think is currently way too low. With the result of people not understanding that they are the product in social networks etc.
Knives are used in everyday life and can't explode or poison you either, yet we don't let our kids run around with knives for example. So saying if something can or can't explode is not a useful metric.
Teaching them how to use a computer under guidance, is useful and so should be treated like a tool to be taught on how to use. Not just handed out willy nilly.
Actually some do. Boy scouts traditionally for example do not think, that kids are generally to be treated as idiots.
So yes, you do not give a knive to someone who cannot handle it. There are 20 year olds who should not be given anything sharper than a plastic knive. But a ordinary child usually can handle dangerous stuff - you lead them there, step by step.
Same with computers, smartphones etc. If neccessary, you can provide a locked down environment at first, with only approved apps and sites (or no internet at all).
But one day, they need to handle it all, without someone holding their hands. And they cannot learn it, if they always only navigated a locked down safe space.
Handing out knives/computers/chemistry sets without training and unsupervised does not help.
They should also be warned about the potential harms as part of their technological education. Children who are adept at typing should be allowed small laptops for note taking. These are just tools. Kids are not all the same, and choice is paramount here.
The issue is not the computers but the awful and toxic software that gets onto them. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram... and other edu-tech wares have absolutely no place in our schools.
They stifle curiosity and free-thinking, and impose meek compliance, and deference to authoritarian values. These are commercial concerns that intrude into places they have no right to, whose objectives are fundamentally misaligned with education because they exploit, extract, distract, manipulate, spy, addict demotivate young minds.
Teaching kids about technology is essential, and should include teaching them proper scepticism and caution. Allowing children to be taught by technology is an abdication of responsibility by schools, teachers and parents.
???
I know of at least two distinct ways to make a toxic chemical using only things found in an entirely normal kitchen[0], and that's just using the things I was taught at school.
Both methods also produce an explosive gas as a side product.
[0] And that's not just a joke at the expense of British cuisine
Part of me wants to see a program where students have to build everything from scratch before they can use it. Like each student gets something like a Rasberry Pi and they have to install an text based OS and then make the graphics stack work. If kids are smart enough to play Minecraft and legos they're smart enough to make something like that work. But basically no teacher would be qualified to teach it or troubleshoot, especially given how poorly we pay teachers currently.
Not to say that everything needs computers, of course not. But banning them seems a not that helpful overkill.
The "user" not being able to change or understand any single program they use, being driven further and further away form the technology, in an almost comical way, that we have arrived to the point of "I dont know if i can plug a keyboard in my laptop".
She tried to save a file, which of course did not work due to some One Drive permission thing, then she uploads it to her teacher in Teams, and it gets automatically converted from docx to odt or something else, so what she sees is not what the teacher sees, and of course there were subtle differences in the order of the images and etc, so it affects her grade.
She got quite stressed until I just told her to make a pdf and upload it, but she was smart to double check and download the uploaded file and figure out its not right.
I just dont understand how did we end up here, but more importantly, I dont understand what to do to make it better, so I am just withdrawing, going into a world of riscv and 1.44 floppy drives and just live in a parallel tech universe.
The push to get children familiar with appliance computers as opposed to general purpose computers goes at least as far back as the 1980s with Apple.
So how we ended up here is basically nearly half a century of lobbying from computer manufacturers to promote proprietary computation appliances that children have limited or no control over.
> we studied the law and it turned out that there was a law already on the books... that said that if you donated a piece of scientific instrumentation or computer to a university for educational and research purposes you can take an extra tax deduction.... We thought that if we could apply that law, enhance it a little bit to extend it down to K through 8 and remove the research requirements so it was just educational, then we could give a hundred thousand computers away, one to each school in America.
Steve Jobs, quoted in https://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kids-cant-wait-apple
We are decoupling our children from the actual underlying electrophysical reality by feeding them the Google version of computing, which is a lazy, stupid, point-and-click reduction of the actual processes.
Believe me, it matters for Google and other big tech who create this layer of abstraction between the reality and their customers. Because it matters for their bottom line. Initially the motive may have been totally benign, like making things easier. But the fact that they are profit-oriented corporations incentivizes them to deepen the abstraction further.
The end result? Google execs owning your skills and your data - they pwn you. You don't know how reality works anymore. You want to find a job? Pay Google. You want to store a photo? Pay Google. Wanna call someone? Pay Google. Want to draw something? Pay Google. Want to develop an app so you could at least have this feeling that you could draw something without paying Google? Pay Google.
They are going to be your overlords.
Frankly knowing folks who work at Google, I do not have a lot of confidence that they will succeed at much of anything but selling ads and making money.
Greater societal inequality.
Sounds a bit hyperbolic. How are kids being hurt by Google specifically?
Not specifically related to Google, but we are making our kids write less, which literally dumbs them down: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264763007_Handwriti... (You can find lots of research on this, there's no controversy here.)
Somewhat less of a profound problem is the extreme amount of pollution: https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/chromebook-churn-report-hi...
My kid has brought his third Chromebook in just a few years from school. We are all going to pay for all this, while the big tech generates billions of profits and the whole planet is marching towards tech feudalism.
For actually learning things? It's like pet food packaging.
What do I mean by that? The pets don't buy the food, their owners do; the result is the packaging is designed to appeal to the owners. Does a cat care about the bright colours their retinas can't see, the metaphors they don't have the language comprehension to process? Or do they seem like picky eaters because they're put off food when it has subtle odours that their owners can't perceive? Likewise, are dogs meat-obsessed like pop culture tells us, or are they omnivores that will joyfully wolf down just about anything and wait for their digestive tract to figure out afterwards if it needs to be rapidly expelled?
Parents and schools buy stuff to teach with, it's sold to the adults because the kids have neither the budget nor the judgement to decide what they ought to learn. But how good are those things at teaching? We only find out much later, at first when the kids take exams and we see how well they learned, and later when we look at the same people in the workforce and find out if that exam itself is representative of the skills we care about.
Learning as an adult, I get to see if online courses teach me; I've gone from being a heavy user of Duolingo, even paying for a subscription, to giving up on it entirely as it morphed from lessons into an annoying kids cartoon.
I'm worried that I'm seeing similar from Brilliant.org, too. The older courses on e.g. using Q# to program quantum computers is still good — hard, yes, but good, it's actually pushing me to learn more, and in this it reminds me of when I started learning programming on a Commodore 64 from the user manual when I was aged about 5 or 6 — but the newer course updates over the last year or so have focussed on unskippable "cute" cartoons and the absolute beginner level content that parents and teachers will pay for, not filling in the gaps with the hard stuff that brings in the most educational value.
Although I say that knowing my grades in school wouldn't have been trash if I'd been able to use a computer and not get discriminated for my handwriting.
When I was a teenager in the 2000s you could still go to the mall, walk into an store and fill out a paper application for jobs, though even then they looked at you a bit funny. I’m pretty sure that’s not possible anymore, so it’s effectively required to at least be able to access the internet to find a job and participate in society. You’ll also almost certainly need to know how to use computers, and depending on the work, understand files and file systems.
I’m follow some subreddits that tend to attract younger people who are interested in programming. Whatever you take for granted about basic computer knowledge, I suspect most people don’t have it. One recent example was someone concerned that if they saved more than one file in a folder, it would overwrite anything in there (like a video game save slot). I think for a lot of people their only computer knowledge comes from game consoles and phones.
(Story Time) I had a crazy woman teach a computer elective in highschool, but she made sure everyone left the class typing efficiently without looking and we all knew how to use Excel and PPT. It really helped in college engineering and of course in the work force knowing a little Excel. The ppt stuff sounds ludicrous, but I use it a LOT at work as research and analysis is often summarized and presented to less technical stakeholders in that format. TBH, she basically made sure we were experts in the blue collar aspects of computing that office workers everywhere use. She also taught some history of computing and made sure we all knew common computer terminology like what OS, GUI, DOS, RAM, ROM...etc all meant. In hindsight it was a pretty useful class. The weirdest thing in the class...the teacher had a question on the final that asked which book of the Bible was most like the history of computing. All of us 8th-10th graders were absolutely dumbfounded where this bizzare question came from. Apparently the answer was Exodus, but she couldn't explain to us why and indicated it should be obvious if we had seen Pirates of Silicon Valley.
This argument is often made (and also wrt preparing pupils for their professional life). I don’t think it the reasons you imply are right.
The problem is that nothing they could use now in school will prepare them for what they will need to use in the future. The software, tools and devices they will need will change as technology keeps evolving. What they need to learn is the basics, how to adapt to a new platform and core OPSEC principles. And they can learn that on pretty much anything.
> We need more hackers.
I was a kid of the 1990s, I know what you mean. But I also was a hacker. We had access to computers at school, which was great. But we did not have to use them all the time for things that are better done by other means of communication.
My kid just spent a couple of hours doing some programming on his school laptop, which is fantastic. What is not is requiring the same laptop to take exams with bullshit spyware and requiring it in the classroom for lectures that would be better without them. Then, they are a distraction and they do not help.
> I just spent three hours last night working on spanish homework on a school supplied chromebook with a high schooler, and it was pathetic how bad the UX was, how poorly the laptop performed, and just how painful the entire experience is.
Yes, Chromebooks are terrible. They are actually a hindrance more than anything else.
School budgets for student laptops cap out around $300 and they get cheaper if they're able to. It's a challenge to build a quality device at that price point, even more of a challenge to actually make money doing so.
This isn't an argument schools should have more money, they have plenty and some of the areas with terrible performance are spending a fortune a year per student, more a criticism of where that money is going if this is the tool they're supposed to learn with and it's not being spent there.
I know. Schools already tend to be under-funded in a lot of countries (on average, obviously there are local variations, as you say). But at the same time shoddy computers are not very useful either. I don’t have an easy solution.
I would rather claim that this is a preparation for the corporate world where (except for the technology sector) work computers suck and are filled with corporate spyware. :-)
Woah what a reactionary! No ballpoint pens, right?
>2028 the effects of the tech ban were apparent, in mere years, the productivity of this countries students had dropped well below global levels. Graduates the year before were becoming first class citizens as inequality became based on the year you were born.
I'm not sure privacydad has ever deployed or maintained an IT department. A school system is very complex.
For what they offer - Chromebooks are actually very good. My kids' school computers are probably better than most of the corporate-issue windows laptops I've ever had. Google docs/classroom are also very good compared to grab-bag of apps my kids have to use.
--- (general computers-in-school rant) ---
The clear answer is to get computers out of schools as much as possible! I know they won't so if you happen to work on this kind of software - PLEASE advocate for shipping better software!
My kids aren't even taught how to type but are expected to put together slide shows and things every other week.
The testing and assignments done on the computer are full of UX issues like missing scroll bars and confusing + inconsistent <form>s - Some tests allow you to go back and read the material, some don't, some lose your answers in-between, etc.
Every year there is massive churn of "apps" the school district was corrupted into buying to replace last year's crop of junk.
Because Chromebook is Linux kernel + Google proprietary ecosystem & spyware.
When advocates say Linux they just mean the FOSS distros of Linux + FOSS software.
This typically means a standard image the school can manage that has reasonable device management, with a company they can pay, and that their in-house IT can contact for support when the unexpected, unforseeable issues happen.
I have yet to hear one suggest ChromeOS or any Android tablet; those run the Linux kernel, but don't (AFAIK) use nearly any of the GNU software.
And I kind of get it. We've all seen the copy-pasta, and this division took on a life as a joke about a crazy person that takes things too far. But most of the people that make that joke seem to have forgotten that RMS frequently starts off looking crazy, but is nearly always vindicated. Sometimes it's five years, sometimes it's twenty. But it happens more often that not.
I tentatively lean towards calling it "desktop Linux", or perhaps "user-controlled Linux" since that's rather the important part.
User-controlled might be the best I've seen so far, which is really saying something - all it's missing is what happens when it's issued (and administered) by a school or other org.
Now I'm gonna be rolling around phrases like "libre-encouraging Linux" in my head the next few days.
Thanks, I will change that in the article. I appreciate your feedback
On the refurbished laptop market, I see large amounts of the same series of laptops, often Thinkpads, for example. I assume this is because companies will replace entire collections of hardware dated for their purposes. I don't think it is too far-fetched to connect this market to schools in individual districts.
> a laundry list of other "technology solutions" which would be, obviously, impossible for a school system to smoothly maintain or even deploy.
See: https://nextcloud.com/blog/keep-your-data-in-your-school-use...
But does it need to be?
School private networks seem unnecessary, especially nowadays when most apps are cloud-based and don't require installation. Many modern routers support domain blacklists to prevent access to inappropriate content. What else is needed?
The only regulation that works is self-regulation. The way to ensure that companies self-regulate is by punishing them (directors and shareholders) harshly whenever they cause harm or damage.
We need to keep our data in Denmark and become less dependent on American companies (and especially Microsoft/Google). But the change needs to be led by IT professionals who care about usability and know better than forcing Linux and LibreOffice down the throat of elderly office workers.
One approach is to identify the business processes they are using Microsoft/Google apps for and then offer the entire process through well-designed web apps hosted in Denmark.
Sure, instead of replacing Windows/M$-Office with Linux/LibreOffice, replace them with a web app which requires the elderly office workers to change their habits even more?
Why not sponsor developers to contribute to LibreOffice and fix the parts that aren't working or are causing problems instead? If all the public sector entities interested in replacing M$-Office in Europe contributed, they could really make a difference...
The main problem with Linux usability is installing and updating it. If all you do is browse, fill web forms and write documents, and you have the software to do so installed and maintained by someone else, I don't see how it can be much harder to use than Windows. It could even be easier in the sense that they could safely open "catvideo.exe" while slacking at work without causing a disaster.
I moved my mum to Linux over Windows about a decade ago and her only requirement for a computer is that it has to run that "minty thing" - bless her, she has no idea what an OS is or why she should care.
I say there's a fair bit wrong in that sentence that needs unpacking:
Sadly, most schools do not have "IT professionals". They get the person who knew a bit about computers and rose into the role - often by attending a few week-long Microsoft training sessions pushed at the school.
We need to get more real IT professionals in to schools, those who have professional chartered status and observe codes of ethical practice such as those the BCS advocate.
Secondly, IT professionals do not necessarily care or know anything about usability. That suitability is for the teacher to discern. Administrators care about budgets and ease of administration. It's their convenience and usability that comes first. Usability is context dependent. Which leads us to....
There is nothing wrong with the usability of LibreOffice or Linux. They are both excellent products and in my subjective experience far superior to those from Microsoft or Google.
We are talking about kids who have minimal needs and are working on school projects, like a 1000 word essay, not important business deals, safety critical systems or urgent reports with pristine scientific typesetting that need to be published yesterday in Nature.
Pay is too low compared to what they can get elsewhere.
I was writing book reports on that exact stack over a decade ago. Its perfectly fine for students. Most people don't even explicitly chose Windows. They just use and adapt to whatever comes with their computer.
>forcing Linux and LibreOffice down the throat of elderly office workers.
Let office workers chose their needs on a case by case basis. But that shouldn't affect the stack you give to students.
Though Google now feels familiar and relatively easy (though try moving documents from one folder to another online...), I'd almost forgotten that when it was first introduced, it was met with a lot of resistance, and teachers and students alike were confused for years.
Microsoft spaces (Teams, Edge) are far, far worse.
Since the schools I've worked at run their own servers locally, I think using Nextcloud as your main platform should be very doable. The apps you can install are mostly very slick and modern. (I use Talk for calls now, for example). https://nextcloud.com/blog/keep-your-data-in-your-school-use...
I see the point about the clunkiness of LibreOffice. But as a teacher, I see great value in thinking carefully about what you introduce students to, because once a decision is in place, the effect multiplies with each new cohort of students.
Fedora? Yes please.
LibreOffice is downright terrible, please do not lump it into a problem of OS replacements. I'm 100% convinced there is some M$ plant that deliberately makes the GUI bad. I still use it, and I use Google's.
You can see how much young Danes idolise the US. This could be said for more EU countries, but by my experience living in Denmark, it is much more pronounced there.
> Danish schools will no longer be allowed to use Chromebooks and Google platforms
The ACTUAL Title of article, and leading paragraphs, may (sadly) tell a slightly different story:
> Final Decision on Chromebook Case in Denmark
> 03 Feb, 2024
> This week saw a conclusion on the Danish Chromebook case. The result, long-awaited by father and privacy activist Jesper Graugaard, shows that the Danish Data Protection Authority has issued an injunction regarding the tracking of children's personal data via Chromebook and Google platforms in schools.
> From 1 August 2024 onwards, Danish schools will no longer be allowed to enable Chromebooks and Google platforms to collect students' personal data for processing. Each municipality will need to give an indication of how they will comply to this injunction by 1 March 2024.
Now seriously, if Chromebooks didn't exist, couldn't you imagine a Black Mirror episode around this very theme?
"From 1 August 2024 onwards, Danish schools will no longer be allowed to enable Chromebooks and Google platforms to collect students' personal data for processing."
Sounds like some crazy person just screwed up education for everyone.
In the mean time (till August) schools can continue using Google WorkSpace.
Is this an excuse to use Windows on schools? I mean... if you use expensive hardware on closed and paid proprietary platforms, then that problem goes away.
on the other hand it's an advertising company getting devices with their software to the kids, combined with often IT-Admins School Directors which don't understand how to create policies and implement them correctly.
From 1 August 2024 onwards, Danish schools will no longer be allowed to enable Chromebooks and Google platforms to collect students' personal data for processing
> The conclusion of the Danish Data Protection Authority's decision is that there is authority to pass on the students' information for the purpose of providing the services, improving the security and reliability of the services, communication with e.g. the municipalities and compliance with legal obligations.
> At the same time, however, the assessment is that the Folkeskole Act does not sufficiently clearly authorize the municipalities to pass on the students' information for the maintenance and improvement of the Google Workspace for Education service, ChromeOS and the Chrome browser, or for measuring the performance and development of new functions and services in ChromeOS and the Chrome browser.
That's very different than the DPA outright saying Chromebooks "will no longer be allowed", period. Google could introduce a toggle to separate the two in order not to lose the entire market, schools could dual-boot a Linux distro on them, and so on.
Like everything GDPR-related, it's far more nuanced than what random HN commenters want to believe.
> "But I cannot help but wonder about the decision that has landed. Because in this case, we are not talking about sensitive data relating to the individual child, which is used, for example, for marketing."
> "The case concerns pseudonymized and aggregated usage data, such as data to measure a browser's performance or data to assess whether a button in a digital solution works better if it is green rather than blue."
There is no way to really check if Google, or any other modern timesharing provider is behaving as expected.
Why is this all reports via ppl in LinkedIn?
In Danish only I suppose
Students cannot use Chromebooks to Linux, Python, or Git.
Google Colab requires internet access to run a notebook.
JupyterLite doesn't yet have "GitBash" in a terminal in WASM; though Chrome does now support local filesystem access for notebooks and data.
VScode + Containers or no deal.