4 ms·

I am an American high school senior and can say confidently that most American students are screwed over pretty extensively when it comes to the software they a

I am an American high school senior and can say confidently that most American students are screwed over pretty extensively when it comes to the software they are forced to use. I have several classes that require the use of proprietary software such as Google classroom, Microsoft silver light, and Adobe flash. On top of that I cannot even remember the last time I was given a document that wasn't a .docx. It would be one thing if these tools were optional, but they are strictly required and students' grades do suffer if they choose to opt out of using them. In previous years I simply followed along in my windows VM, but after getting accepted to the university of my choice I've had enough. I have alerted all of my teachers I will not be using Google classroom, or complete any assignment that requires the use of flash, silver light, or any other proprietary software. Has my grade suffered? Sure, but now that I am securely in the school of my choice I could not care less.

mavhc 11y ago
Won't the university have similar requirements? Society is living with compromises. If you want everyone to switch to open source software make it better than the alternatives, they won't switch because of any other reason.
- cbhl 11y ago
  My university was interesting; you could get a computer degree with the Engineering department or with the Math/CS department, and their IT policies were polar opposites. Engineering was 99% Windows/MATLAB/Visual Studio/you name it. CS was 99% Linux/GCC/CUPS/etc. If you were on the wrong platform you had a hell of a time submitting assignments. (CS students on Windows found their C programs would run fine on their laptops but would crash in the CS environment because of compiler and C std lib differences. Engineering students on Linux found that they couldn't open the .docx files to submit lab reports without destroying the mandatory formatting in the tables.)
  - psykovsky 11y ago
    So, supposedly educated young persons couldn't even "Save as..." and choose a free format when saving the documents? That's not a software problem...
    - detaro 11y ago
      And having a copy in a free format helps with submitting a correctly formatted .docx how?
      - psykovsky 11y ago
        They[0] should be saving the documents in a free format, despite the closed source software. Office supports .odf files or some other free format, does it not? [0] By "they" I mean the persons who created the documents, not the ones who try to edit them using Gnu/Linux...
- the_ancient 11y ago
  It is already is better..... Proprietary tools sustain because of better marketing, and legacy costs (retaining staff to do things in a different way) Often when people talk about open source "not being as good" what they really mean is "not being the exact same" if a button is in a different spot or something is named differently that is perceived as being "worse" because for the most part people hate change.
  - mavhc 11y ago
    Well, Google Classroom and GAFE is new, so no legacy costs. So what's the equivalent open source solution that's as good and easy to set up? GAFE requires a dns change, and optionally syncing your directory with them, and has a modern interface for the admin user. So to be easier I'd probably want a debian package, or a virtual machine image. If someone would package a virtual machine image that interfaced with common directories, provided web office tools, and a version of Classroom (which doesn't have many features), for free, it would probably have some traction, not needing to rely on the internet connection at school to be stable.
    - danieldk 11y ago
      GAFE requires a dns change, and optionally syncing your directory with them, and has a modern interface for the admin user. So to be easier I'd probably want a debian package, or a virtual machine image. I think it wouldn't be hard to provide a virtual machine image that provides similar functionality to Google Apps (at least e-mail, storage, calendaring, and address books). Educational institutes switch to GAFE because it cuts away a lot of sysadmin salaries. You do not have to worry about getting your SMTP server whitelisted when a student/employee falls for phishing, ensure redundancy, scale up the architecture as users have more data, replace malfunctioning servers, etc. Of course, Google's competition to an open source solution is not really fair. First of all, Google can benefit the economy of scale. Secondly, Google is large enough to assume the cost in trade for future income (get them hooked or locked in). Thirdly, Google can to use the data indefinitely to some extend for their own use (e.g. training models). An open source solution can only win over GAFE (or perhaps Office 365) when a principled choice is made to protect the privacy of students and employees. tl;dr: it is hard to compete with free.
- DadFoundMy 11y ago
  That's a good point, but an issue I will have to face when that time comes. Being accepted into school isn't a solution to my problem with the public education system, but a temporary out.
mgraczyk 11y ago
While I don't agree with it, I can at least sympathize with the point of view that you should be entitled to abstain from providing data about yourself or your behavior to a third party like Google. However, your objection to the use of proprietary software seems completely misguided to me and reeks of overzealous naivety. The software you describe are tools for educating and conveying information. Why don't you object to your being forced to use other proprietary, non-software tools? Your teachers "force" you to use the textbook they select for the course because if every student used a different textbook, the teachers' jobs would become impossible. Why do you accept the "forced" textbook but not the forced software tool? Your teachers force you to use a particular software tool because education would be hopelessly inefficient if every student were using different tools.
- the_ancient 11y ago
  You honestly can not see the difference between a text book and being required to use software tools that are continually collecting data about you outside of your control...
- DadFoundMy 11y ago
  I do not necessarily have an issue with using proprietary software; I have an issue with being forced to use proprietary software. I do not think a valid comparison can be drawn to being forced into using a specific textbook. There is nothing "active" about a textbook unlike software. There is nothing hidden away from me that I am unable to see in the textbooks. Any biases or malicious activity will be visible and avoidable. In proprietary software this is not the case.
  - mgraczyk 11y ago
    I disagree that "There is nothing hidden away from me that I am unable to see in the textbooks". Biases are often difficult to detect by non-experts. Textbooks commonly reflect the biases of their authors. These biases range from benign (Sedgewick doesn't like parent pointers, so he rants against them in his book) to malevolent (See any social studies text in Texas). Without sufficient knowledge of the subject, a reader may be unaware of the author's biases and will shape his view of the subject based on biased information. Most high school students (and people in general) do not have sufficient knowledge of history to carefully analyze the biases of their author, nor do they have enough time to read enough books to access a balanced view. We accept the negative effects of this bias when the effects are minor, as is the case with most high school textbooks. The benefits of forcing everybody to use the same textbook generally outweigh harm caused by bias.
dboreham 11y ago
My two sons are in middle school. The school has been transitioning to Google (from self-hosted Windows/Office). They presented a computer/network use and privacy policy for parents to sign. After reading it I sat my kids down and told them to under no circumstances do anything with the school's computers or WiFi network other than activity strictly related to their school assignments. No personal email, no casual web browsing, nothing. They know to use their smart phones for anything non-school related, and to never connect those devices to the school's network.
- mark_l_watson 11y ago
  +1 for paying attention to the privacy policy! Our daughter and son in law are also similarly careful about our grandkids' use of school systems and the Internet in general.
  - dboreham 11y ago
    Well, I did have to endure some major eye-rolling from their mother while I held up the line at student enrollment for 20 minutes while I parsed the agreement ;)
    - pdkl95 11y ago
      This is more evidence that there should be a minimum-reading-time requirement for contracts to be considered valid. We now have the capability to algorithmically generate an estimate of how long it should take an average person to read any given text. Take something like 3/4 of that time (this value is tunable), and if a person wasn't given at least that much time to read a contract, then there patently cannot be a "meeting of the minds"[1] and the contract was never established. This removes much of the social pressure against holding up the line, and discourages extra-long contracts. Every contract should be read and understood completely. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meeting_of_the_minds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meeting_of_the_minds
      - dboreham 11y ago
irremediable 11y ago
Good for you! I did similar stuff in school -- although I think my situation was easier, because even in the late 2000s, tablets/laptops weren't ubiquitous, and the school had to accept paper-based submissions for things. Good luck with your college.
soylentcola 11y ago
You think that's bad...I work in a university and a different segment of my department is responsible for implementing and managing ExamSoft SofTest on student computers. For those that aren't aware, it's essentially a solution to the issue of BYOD. Students want to use their own laptops to take exams (and I'm sure it's also a lot more economical for the school since each student will already own a computer whereas building large computer labs and maintaining many machines just for computerized testing would be prohibitively expensive in our current facility). The way it works is you essentially grant the software low level root/admin access to your machine so it can sandbox exam software and prevent you from running anything else during tests. This alone would drive me batshit insane if I was a student forced to use this setup but the worst part is that the actual software always seems out of date and doesn't support current OS versions. We had so many problems this term when students arrived in the fall with new laptops running Windows 10 and OSX 10.11. Apparently, ExamSoft hadn't had enough time to make sure their software worked properly with these new releases so students were told a) if you haven't upgraded to the most recent OS version yet, don't do so. b) if you have recently upgraded to the most recent OS version, you should downgrade. c) if you just bought your computer with the latest OS version installed, um...we'll try to work something out. I am so glad I am not in the group that handles this stuff because it seemed like a total shit show. The nature of the software prevents it from running in a VM so you can't just run an instance of Windows 8 or OSX 10.10. A lot of the exams aren't simple computerized versions of the old scantrons or paper tests and require the use of software run from inside SofTest. And the worst part is that people generally want to keep their OS fully updated and patched for security and support purposes (not to mention the money people spend on new computers only to find that the required software only runs on old OS versions). From my end, dealing more with online course delivery, I've thankfully been able to move us away from Flash or Silverlight players for watching recorded content but there's still infrastructure that we need to work around since we can't simply replace it all if the frameworks in place still require some plugin or another for the time being. Not so much a privacy issue as one of keeping up with advances and standards when enterprise/education software can be slow to adapt.
- beltorak 11y ago
  This is exactly why public organizations should never be reliant on proprietary platforms. If those tools ran in Linux, the solution would be simple: burn some live CDs. Now anyone with a machine that has software more up to date than this SoftTest can handle just needs to reboot to a school-provided live CD. I don't think I'd have much of a problem doing that if I could prevent that bit of proprietary crap from mucking up my laptop. Sadly I don't think that option is readily available (or cost effective) for windows or mac.

mavhc 11y ago

Won't the university have similar requirements? Society is living with compromises. If you want everyone to switch to open source software make it better than the alternatives, they won't switch because of any other reason.

cbhl 11y ago
My university was interesting; you could get a computer degree with the Engineering department or with the Math/CS department, and their IT policies were polar opposites. Engineering was 99% Windows/MATLAB/Visual Studio/you name it. CS was 99% Linux/GCC/CUPS/etc. If you were on the wrong platform you had a hell of a time submitting assignments. (CS students on Windows found their C programs would run fine on their laptops but would crash in the CS environment because of compiler and C std lib differences. Engineering students on Linux found that they couldn't open the .docx files to submit lab reports without destroying the mandatory formatting in the tables.)
- psykovsky 11y ago
  So, supposedly educated young persons couldn't even "Save as..." and choose a free format when saving the documents? That's not a software problem...
  - detaro 11y ago
    And having a copy in a free format helps with submitting a correctly formatted .docx how?
    - psykovsky 11y ago
      They[0] should be saving the documents in a free format, despite the closed source software. Office supports .odf files or some other free format, does it not? [0] By "they" I mean the persons who created the documents, not the ones who try to edit them using Gnu/Linux...
the_ancient 11y ago
It is already is better..... Proprietary tools sustain because of better marketing, and legacy costs (retaining staff to do things in a different way) Often when people talk about open source "not being as good" what they really mean is "not being the exact same" if a button is in a different spot or something is named differently that is perceived as being "worse" because for the most part people hate change.
- mavhc 11y ago
  Well, Google Classroom and GAFE is new, so no legacy costs. So what's the equivalent open source solution that's as good and easy to set up? GAFE requires a dns change, and optionally syncing your directory with them, and has a modern interface for the admin user. So to be easier I'd probably want a debian package, or a virtual machine image. If someone would package a virtual machine image that interfaced with common directories, provided web office tools, and a version of Classroom (which doesn't have many features), for free, it would probably have some traction, not needing to rely on the internet connection at school to be stable.
  - danieldk 11y ago
    GAFE requires a dns change, and optionally syncing your directory with them, and has a modern interface for the admin user. So to be easier I'd probably want a debian package, or a virtual machine image. I think it wouldn't be hard to provide a virtual machine image that provides similar functionality to Google Apps (at least e-mail, storage, calendaring, and address books). Educational institutes switch to GAFE because it cuts away a lot of sysadmin salaries. You do not have to worry about getting your SMTP server whitelisted when a student/employee falls for phishing, ensure redundancy, scale up the architecture as users have more data, replace malfunctioning servers, etc. Of course, Google's competition to an open source solution is not really fair. First of all, Google can benefit the economy of scale. Secondly, Google is large enough to assume the cost in trade for future income (get them hooked or locked in). Thirdly, Google can to use the data indefinitely to some extend for their own use (e.g. training models). An open source solution can only win over GAFE (or perhaps Office 365) when a principled choice is made to protect the privacy of students and employees. tl;dr: it is hard to compete with free.
DadFoundMy 11y ago
That's a good point, but an issue I will have to face when that time comes. Being accepted into school isn't a solution to my problem with the public education system, but a temporary out.

mgraczyk 11y ago

While I don't agree with it, I can at least sympathize with the point of view that you should be entitled to abstain from providing data about yourself or your behavior to a third party like Google. However, your objection to the use of proprietary software seems completely misguided to me and reeks of overzealous naivety. The software you describe are tools for educating and conveying information. Why don't you object to your being forced to use other proprietary, non-software tools? Your teachers "force" you to use the textbook they select for the course because if every student used a different textbook, the teachers' jobs would become impossible. Why do you accept the "forced" textbook but not the forced software tool? Your teachers force you to use a particular software tool because education would be hopelessly inefficient if every student were using different tools.

the_ancient 11y ago
You honestly can not see the difference between a text book and being required to use software tools that are continually collecting data about you outside of your control...
DadFoundMy 11y ago
I do not necessarily have an issue with using proprietary software; I have an issue with being forced to use proprietary software. I do not think a valid comparison can be drawn to being forced into using a specific textbook. There is nothing "active" about a textbook unlike software. There is nothing hidden away from me that I am unable to see in the textbooks. Any biases or malicious activity will be visible and avoidable. In proprietary software this is not the case.
- mgraczyk 11y ago
  I disagree that "There is nothing hidden away from me that I am unable to see in the textbooks". Biases are often difficult to detect by non-experts. Textbooks commonly reflect the biases of their authors. These biases range from benign (Sedgewick doesn't like parent pointers, so he rants against them in his book) to malevolent (See any social studies text in Texas). Without sufficient knowledge of the subject, a reader may be unaware of the author's biases and will shape his view of the subject based on biased information. Most high school students (and people in general) do not have sufficient knowledge of history to carefully analyze the biases of their author, nor do they have enough time to read enough books to access a balanced view. We accept the negative effects of this bias when the effects are minor, as is the case with most high school textbooks. The benefits of forcing everybody to use the same textbook generally outweigh harm caused by bias.

dboreham 11y ago

My two sons are in middle school. The school has been transitioning to Google (from self-hosted Windows/Office). They presented a computer/network use and privacy policy for parents to sign. After reading it I sat my kids down and told them to under no circumstances do anything with the school's computers or WiFi network other than activity strictly related to their school assignments. No personal email, no casual web browsing, nothing. They know to use their smart phones for anything non-school related, and to never connect those devices to the school's network.

mark_l_watson 11y ago
+1 for paying attention to the privacy policy! Our daughter and son in law are also similarly careful about our grandkids' use of school systems and the Internet in general.
- dboreham 11y ago
  Well, I did have to endure some major eye-rolling from their mother while I held up the line at student enrollment for 20 minutes while I parsed the agreement ;)
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    This is more evidence that there should be a minimum-reading-time requirement for contracts to be considered valid. We now have the capability to algorithmically generate an estimate of how long it should take an average person to read any given text. Take something like 3/4 of that time (this value is tunable), and if a person wasn't given at least that much time to read a contract, then there patently cannot be a "meeting of the minds"[1] and the contract was never established. This removes much of the social pressure against holding up the line, and discourages extra-long contracts. Every contract should be read and understood completely. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meeting_of_the_minds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meeting_of_the_minds
    - dboreham 11y ago

irremediable 11y ago

Good for you! I did similar stuff in school -- although I think my situation was easier, because even in the late 2000s, tablets/laptops weren't ubiquitous, and the school had to accept paper-based submissions for things. Good luck with your college.

soylentcola 11y ago

You think that's bad...I work in a university and a different segment of my department is responsible for implementing and managing ExamSoft SofTest on student computers. For those that aren't aware, it's essentially a solution to the issue of BYOD. Students want to use their own laptops to take exams (and I'm sure it's also a lot more economical for the school since each student will already own a computer whereas building large computer labs and maintaining many machines just for computerized testing would be prohibitively expensive in our current facility). The way it works is you essentially grant the software low level root/admin access to your machine so it can sandbox exam software and prevent you from running anything else during tests. This alone would drive me batshit insane if I was a student forced to use this setup but the worst part is that the actual software always seems out of date and doesn't support current OS versions. We had so many problems this term when students arrived in the fall with new laptops running Windows 10 and OSX 10.11. Apparently, ExamSoft hadn't had enough time to make sure their software worked properly with these new releases so students were told a) if you haven't upgraded to the most recent OS version yet, don't do so. b) if you have recently upgraded to the most recent OS version, you should downgrade. c) if you just bought your computer with the latest OS version installed, um...we'll try to work something out. I am so glad I am not in the group that handles this stuff because it seemed like a total shit show. The nature of the software prevents it from running in a VM so you can't just run an instance of Windows 8 or OSX 10.10. A lot of the exams aren't simple computerized versions of the old scantrons or paper tests and require the use of software run from inside SofTest. And the worst part is that people generally want to keep their OS fully updated and patched for security and support purposes (not to mention the money people spend on new computers only to find that the required software only runs on old OS versions). From my end, dealing more with online course delivery, I've thankfully been able to move us away from Flash or Silverlight players for watching recorded content but there's still infrastructure that we need to work around since we can't simply replace it all if the frameworks in place still require some plugin or another for the time being. Not so much a privacy issue as one of keeping up with advances and standards when enterprise/education software can be slow to adapt.

beltorak 11y ago
This is exactly why public organizations should never be reliant on proprietary platforms. If those tools ran in Linux, the solution would be simple: burn some live CDs. Now anyone with a machine that has software more up to date than this SoftTest can handle just needs to reboot to a school-provided live CD. I don't think I'd have much of a problem doing that if I could prevent that bit of proprietary crap from mucking up my laptop. Sadly I don't think that option is readily available (or cost effective) for windows or mac.