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Congrats on the adoption, although I still don't think it's moving our public institutions in the right direction. It's really just moving a lot more kids into

by jalami 10y ago

Congrats on the adoption, although I still don't think it's moving our public institutions in the right direction. It's really just moving a lot more kids into a walled garden. I know Google has been in hot water for collecting student data recently and has since taken steps to fix it. That's their primary business model though. "Anonymizing" promises always follow and then it's a trust game again. I can see a future where a mandatory Google account follows you up the grades. Educational software is released exclusively in Google's Play store. Assignments and homework are handed in with Google Drive and Google Docs. Sure this is great for Google, but I think our public institutions suffer from such a third-party centrality. I remember at UW-Madison, it was annoying having to pay for a semester long subscription to whatever the professor decided was a good cms for the class, but at least the costs were explicit and there wasn't a monopoly player in the field that everyone had to use. IMHO, Google is more interested in getting people into the garden than it is in selling hardware or fostering education.

groovypuppy 10y ago
"I can see a future where a mandatory Google account follows you up the grades. Educational software is released exclusively in Google's Play store. Assignments and homework are handed in with Google Drive and Google Docs." This is not the future. This is now. At the school district where I volunteer as a computer instructor, all the first graders already have a Google account that will follow them throughout their grades. In fact their user names include the year they are expected to graduate. They are teaching first graders how to use Google docs. Editing a Google doc is their first big lesson. I see them as walled in, but from their perspective the Google ecosystem is all there is to the internet.
- aedron 10y ago
  Same thing here, only they are using Microsoft's cloud stuff for MS Office. These cloud suites are just too convenient not to use, and as long as there is no open and free alternative, it seems schools are stuck choosing between one of the oligopolists.
danieldk 10y ago
They took a page from Microsoft's playbook. They know that you have to capture the next generation in schools. I agree with your worries. But it also tells that other parties in the market have utterly failed to compete. iPads used to get traction, but are more expensive, and Apple doesn't provide a complete ecosystem like Google Apps for Education. Microsoft has been sleeping, they have all the pieces but wanted to push Windows as-is. The open source solutions require you to hire some sysadmins, while Google Apps did exactly the opposite: it cut out some personnel that used to maintain the infrastructure.
- kuschku 10y ago
  > The open source solutions require you to hire some sysadmins That is rarely an issue, though – even my German (combined middle and high) school had a dedicated sysadmin and two teachers teaching computer science who had a PhD in compsci. Developing custom systems, running them, etc comes a lot cheaper longterm than going into vendor lock-in (especially with privacy laws, where even looking at Google can cost you millions)
- jalami 10y ago
  I think it's fair to say that nothing will be as convenient as a single centralized body controlling all the data management, client software/hardware and services under one roof. Nothing, not ever. So its not really an incompetent market so much as an incompetent or lethargic school system willing to make deep present and future concessions for a one click solution. The complete package is the problem, not the solution. You can't provide a modular and open ecosystem of small, single-concern pieces of software and hardware that rivals the single-provider model. When a single-provider model becomes entrenched, it's near impossible for those modular offerings to take root as they won't interop with the defacto Google, by design. Our education system now has a MAINFRAME. For all the mud Microsoft gets, their ecosystem was pretty modular because that was their business model. They're locking it down and becoming more cloudy every day, but for a long while, Microsoft didn't care what you ran, didn't explicitly track your usage and worked with a wide variety of disparate multi-vendor software. I'm not saying Windows is where we should have been nor that it wasn't a lock-in of a sort, but we're not really better off now. Apple iPads were less open than Windows, but had consistent hardware. Now Google has achieved the complete solution. I think a large part of it is the framework v. libraries argument all over again in a different package. I think we're on the swing back now where we want to trust providers a lot more than after the corporate IBM fallout. With everyone getting their music from Spotify, movies from Netflix, games from Steam, analytics from GA, chat from Slack, books from Kindle, etc. Schools are asking, why not us too? For a lot of people, schools aren't something you can just decide not to sign the EULA and walk away from though. These chromebooks are just cheap thin clients for Google services. They're some of the most locked down devices on the market, but thanks to the internet being decentralized by nature and Google seeming like the door to the internet, their centralization doesn't seem so scary. They interop with little else and hold no data, even printing hits their servers first before your school's printer. Here's to hoping for a swing-back.
simula67 10y ago
> Google is more interested in getting people into the garden than it is in selling hardware or fostering education All for-profit companies are interested in turning a profit. No company would be interested in fostering education, no matter what they say. The question is whether their profit motives are harmful to the education. The larger point here is about the dangers of the cloud. Google could chose not to allow you access to your own data. It can hand it over to the government. A hacker can break into your data and impersonate you remotely, even if you went off the grid. If they become a monopoly, they can jack up their prices and you would have no recourse. They could offer you crappy service and you will have to swallow it.
- jalami 10y ago
  I agree with you. Their cloud is really the danger in this relationship. Educators should use products and services whose business model doesn't hamper their ability to remain in control of their students' education. I didn't mean to come off as saying Google isn't sincere and another company with similar offerings would be. It's business. I think it will get beyond individual school/department lock-in though. Steam, for example, hasn't simply locked-in consumers to their purchases and made it difficult to transition away. Developers are often locked in because they rely on Steam for match-making, piracy-busting, cloud saving, achievements apis, server-hosting, modding support, etc. etc. All of this offloaded centralization is easier than doing it yourself and more like the console's devs are used to. If you want a AAA PC game, you're more than likely going to get it exclusively on Steam. Android is already there, many/most of the apps require Google's services for even mainline functionality and definitely for consumer discovery. Google education could be next if it gets adopted like Google Analytics as the de-facto api, educators would have no choice in the matter. All good products use Google's apis for everything.
rpdillon 10y ago
I'm limited to only my experience in the U.S. public school system (and two universities, one private, one public) but education itself seems to be a walled garden. Curricula are set by policy, not by the instructor. Textbooks are pre-determined, and largely non-negotiable. Many classes mandate all sorts of closed software, sometimes begrudgingly allowing Octave in place of Matlab, for example. Many CS courses mandate a particular language, proprietary or not. And it's nothing new; when I was growing up, it was Apple ][ machines in every classroom. Even in my master's program, the layout templates for the thesis were provided assuming I was using Word. I had to parse them and mirror them into LaTeX so I could use the tools of my choice. I understand and agree with your concerns, but choice has never been a staple of the education system I've encountered. Perhaps it is different elsewhere.

by jalami 10y ago

groovypuppy 10y ago

"I can see a future where a mandatory Google account follows you up the grades. Educational software is released exclusively in Google's Play store. Assignments and homework are handed in with Google Drive and Google Docs." This is not the future. This is now. At the school district where I volunteer as a computer instructor, all the first graders already have a Google account that will follow them throughout their grades. In fact their user names include the year they are expected to graduate. They are teaching first graders how to use Google docs. Editing a Google doc is their first big lesson. I see them as walled in, but from their perspective the Google ecosystem is all there is to the internet.

aedron 10y ago
Same thing here, only they are using Microsoft's cloud stuff for MS Office. These cloud suites are just too convenient not to use, and as long as there is no open and free alternative, it seems schools are stuck choosing between one of the oligopolists.

danieldk 10y ago

They took a page from Microsoft's playbook. They know that you have to capture the next generation in schools. I agree with your worries. But it also tells that other parties in the market have utterly failed to compete. iPads used to get traction, but are more expensive, and Apple doesn't provide a complete ecosystem like Google Apps for Education. Microsoft has been sleeping, they have all the pieces but wanted to push Windows as-is. The open source solutions require you to hire some sysadmins, while Google Apps did exactly the opposite: it cut out some personnel that used to maintain the infrastructure.

kuschku 10y ago
> The open source solutions require you to hire some sysadmins That is rarely an issue, though – even my German (combined middle and high) school had a dedicated sysadmin and two teachers teaching computer science who had a PhD in compsci. Developing custom systems, running them, etc comes a lot cheaper longterm than going into vendor lock-in (especially with privacy laws, where even looking at Google can cost you millions)
jalami 10y ago
I think it's fair to say that nothing will be as convenient as a single centralized body controlling all the data management, client software/hardware and services under one roof. Nothing, not ever. So its not really an incompetent market so much as an incompetent or lethargic school system willing to make deep present and future concessions for a one click solution. The complete package is the problem, not the solution. You can't provide a modular and open ecosystem of small, single-concern pieces of software and hardware that rivals the single-provider model. When a single-provider model becomes entrenched, it's near impossible for those modular offerings to take root as they won't interop with the defacto Google, by design. Our education system now has a MAINFRAME. For all the mud Microsoft gets, their ecosystem was pretty modular because that was their business model. They're locking it down and becoming more cloudy every day, but for a long while, Microsoft didn't care what you ran, didn't explicitly track your usage and worked with a wide variety of disparate multi-vendor software. I'm not saying Windows is where we should have been nor that it wasn't a lock-in of a sort, but we're not really better off now. Apple iPads were less open than Windows, but had consistent hardware. Now Google has achieved the complete solution. I think a large part of it is the framework v. libraries argument all over again in a different package. I think we're on the swing back now where we want to trust providers a lot more than after the corporate IBM fallout. With everyone getting their music from Spotify, movies from Netflix, games from Steam, analytics from GA, chat from Slack, books from Kindle, etc. Schools are asking, why not us too? For a lot of people, schools aren't something you can just decide not to sign the EULA and walk away from though. These chromebooks are just cheap thin clients for Google services. They're some of the most locked down devices on the market, but thanks to the internet being decentralized by nature and Google seeming like the door to the internet, their centralization doesn't seem so scary. They interop with little else and hold no data, even printing hits their servers first before your school's printer. Here's to hoping for a swing-back.

simula67 10y ago

> Google is more interested in getting people into the garden than it is in selling hardware or fostering education All for-profit companies are interested in turning a profit. No company would be interested in fostering education, no matter what they say. The question is whether their profit motives are harmful to the education. The larger point here is about the dangers of the cloud. Google could chose not to allow you access to your own data. It can hand it over to the government. A hacker can break into your data and impersonate you remotely, even if you went off the grid. If they become a monopoly, they can jack up their prices and you would have no recourse. They could offer you crappy service and you will have to swallow it.

jalami 10y ago
I agree with you. Their cloud is really the danger in this relationship. Educators should use products and services whose business model doesn't hamper their ability to remain in control of their students' education. I didn't mean to come off as saying Google isn't sincere and another company with similar offerings would be. It's business. I think it will get beyond individual school/department lock-in though. Steam, for example, hasn't simply locked-in consumers to their purchases and made it difficult to transition away. Developers are often locked in because they rely on Steam for match-making, piracy-busting, cloud saving, achievements apis, server-hosting, modding support, etc. etc. All of this offloaded centralization is easier than doing it yourself and more like the console's devs are used to. If you want a AAA PC game, you're more than likely going to get it exclusively on Steam. Android is already there, many/most of the apps require Google's services for even mainline functionality and definitely for consumer discovery. Google education could be next if it gets adopted like Google Analytics as the de-facto api, educators would have no choice in the matter. All good products use Google's apis for everything.

rpdillon 10y ago

I'm limited to only my experience in the U.S. public school system (and two universities, one private, one public) but education itself seems to be a walled garden. Curricula are set by policy, not by the instructor. Textbooks are pre-determined, and largely non-negotiable. Many classes mandate all sorts of closed software, sometimes begrudgingly allowing Octave in place of Matlab, for example. Many CS courses mandate a particular language, proprietary or not. And it's nothing new; when I was growing up, it was Apple ][ machines in every classroom. Even in my master's program, the layout templates for the thesis were provided assuming I was using Word. I had to parse them and mirror them into LaTeX so I could use the tools of my choice. I understand and agree with your concerns, but choice has never been a staple of the education system I've encountered. Perhaps it is different elsewhere.