Hi,
I will be writing petition to my government (Poland) to try to get them to ban Windows at schools. I believe it should be illegal to force children to use systems that are paid and use children’s data for AI and advertising.
Maybe you will do it as well? Let’s end this insane practice.
I’d start by banning tablets, what the fuck is the point of “learning” IT stuff on a glorified 10 inch phone? Get them fucking laptops, even better with Linux, but I feel like even going BACK to Windows PCs would be an improvement at this point, sad.
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I don’t know how much IT experience you have, but at the end of the day when an organization pays for license, they’re paying for a fall-guy. They want to have someone to go to when there’s a problem with the software, because that’s cheaper than everyone needing to hire an expert at whatever issues pop up to be certain it’s solved.
They don’t want to have a bunch of PCs running whatever distro and domain software the last IT guy felt like going with. And when the next heartbleed/shell shock/spectre happens, they don’t want to have to figure out how to get the fix for the flavors of software they went with. They want to be able to say “hey company, this is what we pay you for” and the company to say “all good, we got you”.
Of course, it is possible to have both open software, and corporate support. This is why redhat exists. Just understand that your IT dept may have a preference based purely on how easy/hard it makes their job. When my PC has some bug or hw incompatibility, I’m willing to take the time to solve it. But someone who doesn’t have that time is going to prefer to just tell the company that made it to solve it.
I’m also on-board with no computers in schools, as someone else brought up. Phones should not be allowed in classrooms. Before we had LLMs running on calculators, my idea was to have a series of optional classes where you build your own calculator starting from logic gates, and that’s the only computer you’re allowed to use.
Which given the budgets that most schools have for equipment, software and staff is currently entirely reasonable.
It’s probably doable if a country pushed to create a defacto well documented distribution that’s paired with a MDM and online office suite. Basically replicate a locked down Chromebook environment, a lot of edu resources are online these days so most activity is through the browser.
EU Office appears to be the start down that road.
and Google (classroom, chromebooks etc). Treating children as products is abuse.
Also ban Google. I think we should ban any schoolwork in required courses that requires students to agree to any third-party EULAs, such as Google account and Windows OS. For selective courses, considering the de facto status that many fields don’t have a mature enough open source software, banning is a bit exceeding proportionality IMHO. And offering Windows computer is probably ok as long as it’s not the default choice IMHO.
In my freshman year in the Electrical Engineering department, I took a required computer programming course, the course that I supposed it to be most aware of the existence of GNU/Linux, free format, and so on. However, it uses Google Sheets for homeworks and demands a Google Drive link of an exe for final team project and YouTube link for presentation. When they let students evaluate each other, I just got a bunch of exe, half of which doesn’t even open in Wine.
I also think they every school should offer NextCloud. Otherwise when team work occurs, Google Drive/Docs/Slides/Sheets is the de facto only choice.
BTW, I think LaTeX with git is more customizable and extensible and should be taught instead of teaching MS Office stuff. I actually take all my notes in LaTeX in a GitHub repo and do reproducible compilations.
BTW, I think LaTeX with git is more customizable and extensible and should be taught instead of teaching MS Office stuff.
Right. I am using it over 30 years now, for uni reports, phd rhesis, talks, letters, CVs, and never had any regret.
There’s a brilliant man who just gave a talk at Defcon who had previously given a talk at TED where he said we should ban all computers in school. 1 sec, I’ll get the link
Cliff Stoll! I highly recommend watching his Defcon talk as well. https://youtu.be/Gj8IA6xOpSk
Wait, is it the astronomer and hacker Clifford Stoll, the autor of “The cuckoos’s egg”? This man is a legend.
Banning computers in school wholesale is about as retarded as a fucking take as you can physically get.
That’s basically the equivalent of saying we can’t fix stupid so we might as well just kill every stupid person. It’s just the most extreme fix to a problem that just creates more problems and hurts the victim even more.
At most I could see an argument saying that computers have to be stupid like they were in the 90s. Anything that says on you more than win98 shouldn’t be allowed. But computer skills are an absolutely mandatory skill set.
That first sentence of yours is remarkably questionable… it absolutely is not even close to being equivalent to killing people ? Your sentiment is computer skills are a mandatory skill … But then suggest they should only be able to practice on windows 98?? How’s that relevant to modern computing??
I definitely think computers should be minimized in schools. Computers are now used in drama, art (not for graphic design) … used way too much in my opinion. From memory I believe there have also been studies that demonstrate better learning outcomes when writing with pen and paper than on a laptop.
Oh man I love Cliff Stoll. His completely over the top hyper TED talk with his notes literally scribbled on his hand. 🤓👌❤️
I wouldn’t “ban Windows at school” as a whole but I would:
- ban schools from installing windows in school computers
- teachers and students can still use it on their own computers, if they want
- ban teachers from requiring windows-only software
- regardless of what you use at school, teachers would often require MS office or Adobe for homework, which would force students to use windows at home
Fully agree.
- ban schools from installing windows in school computers
I would also ban Ai in schools. Some teachers force the children to use Ai.
While I agree with the petition, it shouldn’t be limited to Windows, it should be about software freedom…
That actually makes a lot of sense, if you remove concepts such as “but Windows is already customary here” from your head. From scratch, you’d never want to do this.
If such a petition exists for the Netherlands or EU-wide, I’d sign and subscribe/support.
Good luck!
You may already be aware but perhaps some of the rationale from these projects could help bolster your argument:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/petitions/en/petition/content/html?petitionNumber=0729%2F2024
Thanks! I will use it 😃
Ironically, the US is practically already off MS in schools and has been for a while but it’s Mac and Google Suite that took over. I literally had a college student in my class ask “What is Excel?” as it was listed as an option to conduct calculations.
It’s not better, but I thought that was funny. Big reason that happened, btw, Apple gifted whole computer labs to schools back when it was trying to get market share in the 90s, and now Google does likewise with Chromebook. Too bad there isn’t a Linux organization with enough money to do something like that, as it’s much more effective than banning something.
I work in edtech, and the current landscape is something like 55% ChromeOS, 25% iPad, 15% Windows, 5% Mac. I might have the exact percentages wrong, but I’m pretty sure about the order. The old Mac advantage from the gifted computers is basically gone, and though a lot of primary schools do give students iPads, Windows isn’t really gone gone; a lot of edtech apps are either web-based or built for Windows. You’re right about Google undercutting the market with ChromeOS, though.
Yeah, I figured Chromebook is just the next generation of this stuff and the mac gifting is probably on decline now that they’ve got their market share. It’s good to hear an edtech perspective though. It’s all about cost at this point, I imagine…
With their budgets as they are, absolutely.
This and banning Windows is silly… Ban the functions you don’t want… That way other OSs are lumped in or the OS can be configured appropriately.
Chromebooks and iPads for kids here just made better (brain rot) consumers that know less about computers than their parents and even grandparents.
I’m all for pushing to Linux or de-shittified systems, but “banning Windows” doesn’t suffice and the bigger alternatives have the same problems and/or worse.
It will at least help getting rid of Windows dominance. It is not just about pushing Linux itself, but creating a market with many operating systems. While not ideal for the school, because its preferable to have Linux as the default, still better than everyone using Windows.
I was thinking this 20+ years ago and it makes me sad that Windows is still treated like a product worth using. My work machine is my most hated device in terms of software. Such garbage.
In the US we have a law that says we must keep student records confidential. Yet at my school our email for both faculty and students is provided by TinyFlaccid. I know for a fact that they are scanning and indexing all of that email because that’s the only way they could make reply suggestions. They also have copilot enabled and there is no way to turn it off.
I’m not commenting to pick on you but because I think it’s really important that people understand the details of laws so that they can make informed choices. People often think they have more rights or protections than they do, and they might not make the same choices if they knew otherwise.
If you are referring to FERPA, the decision about whether an email is an education record depends on the content and the context for which it is used. I don’t think it would hold that all emails from an educational account are educational records. ( https://www.aalrr.com/EdLawConnectBlog/a-reminder-that-emails-may-be-education-records )
From the above and specific to whether an email itself can be a record (when there was a paper copy on file)
The court held the electronic messages themselves were not “education records” for purposes of FERPA because, while they related to the student, they were not “maintained” by the educational institution.
(Please note: “the decision was unpublished and therefore cannot be cited.”)
Getting a little more specific: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-34/subtitle-A/part-99/subpart-D/section-99.31
An educational agency or institution may disclose personally identifiable information from an education record of a student without the consent required by § 99.30 if the disclosure meets one or more of the following conditions:
B) A contractor, consultant, volunteer, or other party to whom an agency or institution has outsourced institutional services or functions may be considered a school official under this paragraph provided that the outside party—
(1) Performs an institutional service or function for which the agency or institution would otherwise use employees;
(2) Is under the direct control of the agency or institution with respect to the use and maintenance of education records; and
(3) Is subject to the requirements of § 99.33(a) governing the use and redisclosure of personally identifiable information from education records.
So having access to and using the information in the emails is not necessarily a violation so long as the personally identifiable information is not redisclosed.
Schools have a duty to ensure that the access is for “legitimate educational interests” which is subjective but I could see email tools or copilot being argued as meeting that.
I guess we won’t know until someone challenges it 😉
I’m aware of all of that, but wasn’t looking to write a novel about it.
I am of the opinion that feeding students’ information to AI and to advertising algorithms is not a legitimate educational purpose. Particularly when hosting your own email that doesn’t do that is so trivially simple.
ETA: btw, my nickname is potateo. You could say that’s an arcane spelling of potato!
Having worked at an email provider before, I can assure you that hosting your own email is not, as you put it, “trivially simple.” The number of spam filters that sit between every server is insane, and they’re all controlled by third parties that, almost universally, deem any server hosted on a residential IP address block to be spam. Even medium-sized commercial providers get blacklisted every so often and have to appeal to the filter providers to get back in business. Hosting it yourself is almost guaranteed to mean that nobody ever gets your emails.
This is a nice idea. Wish you good luck!
