Title seems dramatized, not surprising when it’s a blog post from a competitor eager to sell a replacement to said schools. Probably should switch to a better source.
If it isn't, it should be. School is obligatory, we really shouldn't employ commercial products in schools to begin with.
In Portugal, some years ago, kids were given computers with a Linux distro pre-installed for *free*, and LibreOffice was used as a word processor replacement. Argentina did the same thing, hell there were others too.
Those things are also not proprietary to any one company. Outsourcing labor to make generic things we could obtain elsewhere is not the same thing as teaching tools only one company controls.
We should not use schools to further the vendor-lock-in of corporations.
Private companies can develop software with government data rights. Hosting isn’t free but they pay for an n-year contract with support and can find another vendor for the software and hosting in n years if they want. That’s a good collaboration between govt and industry, governments should insist on stuff like this so they retain ownership over what they paid for, as much as possible.
Except the pesky difference that in other cases the school/gov purchases a product for students while in this case it pays nothing and supplies students as the product.
> School is obligatory, we really shouldn't employ commercial products in schools to begin with.
I think a better formulation of this would be following. School is obligatory, we should not employ products that collect private information of students.
Well, yeah I didn't mean to sound so extreme. I was just implying that a product intended for public use shouldn't mean "commercial", in the sense of an end consumer product. Your customer isn't the end consumer.
The same applies to profucts sold to other companies.
That's cool, but you can't give out mailboxes for free like you can give away computers. It needs to run somewhere, the servers maintained by someone. Do you have a better solution than Gmail? I know only about Microsoft, is that even an improvement?
It's great that you do, but that's not a typical school admin skillset. People who know this have zero reason to slave for a school.
> Schools classically self hosted their network services
Back when encryption wasn't even needed, hackers were a curiosity and deliverability wasn't a concern. This is never coming back. School is a very important part of people's lives (parents, children, teachers, other staff), deliverability and security must be perfect.
Schools also manage loads of very private data. As a parent, I don't want the school admin to touch it with a 10-meter pole, I want them to use a managed service that they can't screw up even if they tried very hard (and sometimes school admins look at data themselves - the less opportunity they have the better).
> It is a good opportunity to mentor future sysadmins too.
The point is to have working email that everyone can rely on, not to groom kids/teachers to become sysadmins. It's better for everyone if the school admin focuses on solving things no one else can solve (e.g. handing out the free computers and installing Linux on them) rather than wasting time tinkering with email hosting for public money.
The point here is data privacy. Freemail means you explicitly hand over your (meta)data as a payment. Students are not going to go for Protonmail, they're going to use their already existing Gmail.
You can't rely on students having their own inboxes anyways. They will claim they forgot the password, it doesn't work, they are not getting teacher's messages, etc etc. You need a place where you can deliver critical information and be sure it arrived, and have a way of proving it was/wasn't read, a way of restoring lost access (without losing the messages), a way of proving that access is possible and happened, a way of recovering deleted messages...
They can _choose_ to use whatever they want, as long as the school doesn't force them to use proprietary stuff. It is responsibility of the school system to create an ethical learning environment and not to promote proprietary service providers. Gmail probably doesn't finance schools in Denmark either, so even less of a reason for schools there to do no-cost promotion of Gmail. And that is just one example.
Edit: After choosing something different than the school suggests, the pupils then themselves become responsible for making sure it is a suitable alternative to the non-proprietary ethical solution, that the school suggested.
Email inboxes are one of the many services schools buy, it's not about any promotion and of course Google doesn't promote them, this is a service they provide for money, not some barter. This is like saying they promote a catering provider, furniture manufacturer or paper factory by buying from them... It's not like people aren't capable of using other email providers after using Gmail - email looks just the same regardless of the company (usually works worse though), and people have their own email too, their school inbox is usually not their first nor last contact with it.
Pupils' personal email inbox is their own stuff and completely out of the question. We're talking about school-managed inboxes with addresses ending with the school's domain.
>not about any promotion
You sure? Last I checked Google, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments have aggressive business deals with the educational sector to make sure no other company gets an edge there. I had to buy a nspire calculator for example, since teachers received commissions for the damn things (while in obligatory school).
In university, we had our own servers for various services such as email, until Microsoft came wavering their money around and literally "offering for free" their products for that university.
The sheer market manipulation these companies do is obscene, there really isn't competition, and our kids aren't offered the high quality and respectful services they deserve. In the case of Texas instruments, parents will have their pockets robbed. Thing cost my parents 200 bucks, and the only thing it was used for, was rendering some fancy parabolas.
Anyways, I didn't mean to throw private contracts out the window completely. And, have since clarified that in another reply to this thread.
> You sure? Last I checked Google, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments have aggressive business deals with the educational sector to make sure no other company gets an edge there.
That's because it's a lucrative market you can take with much less negotiation than individual small companies. Every company does that, only few are dealing with the government on the level of Microsoft/Google though.
> I had to buy a nspire calculator for example, since teachers received commissions for the damn things (while in obligatory school).
That sucks, but this is about schools buying Gmail for students' school managed inboxes on the school domain, not about students being forced to use Gmail. This is just like internal company email for example. Students still have their own personal inboxes at whatever service they please.
> The sheer market manipulation these companies do is obscene, there really isn't competition
If there isn't competition, then it's not market manipulation, it's just that they're the only market.
> and our kids aren't offered the high quality and respectful services they deserve
Gmail (and Outlook365) is the highest quality service currently on the market, and since the school is paying for the inbox, Google is not reading the data for ads. You can go for smaller companies with worse offers and much less software included in the subscribtion... But I don't think that's going to be a benefit to the students.
> Thing cost my parents 200 bucks, and the only thing it was used for, was rendering some fancy parabolas.
Again, that sucks, but this is not about parents paying Gmail.
>If there isn't competition, then it's not market manipulation, it's just that they're the only market.
The USA, Europe, and some European countries are already filling antitrust cases against Google and others like it. It's unfair competition. And if you can't see it, then I'm sure that there's nothing I can say to dissuade you.
This isn't just like an internal company email, and I am not saying this is their personal email. Like you're trying to imply.
These companies are trying to create habits and gain trust from naive kids. Making them their future clients.
This creates a neverending circle, and the ones inside of it are so blinded, that'll always turn an eye to alternatives. In a space like this, its near impossible for other companies yo gain an edge, even if their product is better.
It forms a rather powerful emotional allegiance to them, and their products.
Our kids should never be their clients, simply by the fact that their moral compass doesn't adhere to the simplest of market rules, and common sense. They undermine capitalism, they undermine freedom. And if you can't see this, you're blind.
"Use nothing commercial ever" is probably too extreme.
I'd agree with the parent that schools shouldn't be getting kids to use things like GSuite, but not solely because it's commercial - the problem is the data management practices of these companies, which the state should not be supporting by forcing children to use these services to complete their education and inevitably giving companies like Google huge amounts of personal data.
This isn't a problem with textbooks, commercial or otherwise.
Textbooks should really be public domain. They're paid for by public money anyway, it's just we currently also pay 10x the cost to make them directly to elsevier or pearson.
What do you mean, they're paid for by public money? I don't think that's true at all - at least in EU. Some of them get public donations (to support the independence of the authors, usually), and some of them are written by people paid by a university, but there's so much more completely independently funded textbooks...
I might be reading into the previous poster's comment more than originally intended, but basically, most US textbooks, are basically written for use by US public schools. They are effectively being paid for by public money, because the only customer buying those textbooks are public schools funded by public money.
> For the years ended March 31, 2020 and 2019, K-12 traditional print represented 59% ($353 million) and 63% ($357 million) of total K-12 revenue, respectively.
> In the K-12 market in the United States,...We sell our learning solutions directly to school districts across the United States.
This is less true at the university level, since students typically have to pay for their own textbooks, but scholarships, grants, and loans, and other public money sources that go to students are used to cover those costs.
I don't think this is the correct view of the system.
Individual schools in Portugal (as well as where I live, and in the US) are buying books on the market, and the books are competing on it - just writing a textbook doesn't guarantee any school will buy it, it's a risk - and that's great because it means the writers have to make good books and there's a lot of choice and many different styles and price levels.
That's very different from "textbooks paid for by public money" as if the state funded its creation and thus owned the copyright while de-risking it for the authors - meaning paid their salary. EU occasionally provides funding to authors and they're explicit about the writers owning their copyright, because the point is to support their independence. So suggesting moving a work into public domain just because a public school bought it is... weird. Why books and not other education equipment, e.g. chemistry/physics/electronics sets? What about educational software?
Imagine a school bought a book you wrote about programming/whatever you do (the school where I went did that a lot with many different books from small-time authors that were used as textbooks during lessons), should it suddenly become public domain just because some of the money someone spent on it came from taxes? I think that's very broken.
Public schools aren't the only ones buying textbooks anyways. There's a very healthy market of private schools, and I know of textbooks catered specifically to them, some of them even funded by them, that are then also bought by public schools. There's also homeschooling, alternative non-public non-profit schools, etc. Sometimes people buy textbooks by themselves, e.g. adults who want to (re-)learn, parents who think the books provided by school are inadequate, children who destroyed the copy they received at school...
That textbooks are "paid for by public money" is reductio ad absurdum. The system is much more complex. However, I think that the state/EU (or US) should also fund textbooks and put them into the public domain, as long as using them isn't mandatory - that's a great idea and it never hurts to have one more option.
Yeah, you're right. Even my reaction at Google software finding it's way into public schools is too extreme.
I guess that my knowledge of these companies manipulative business practices does fire me up.
As long as there is a public competition, and the decision is well formed, intended and transmitted transparently, there shouldn't be a problem.
What's so bad about LibreOffice? If they want they want, they can use another word processor out of their own volition, the problem here is Word being the default.
The ruling is "the first in a series of cases regarding the use of Chromebooks and the G-suite for education". So likely this is just the beginning.
There have been two rulings regarding this particular municipality. First, they were investigated due to a data breach (personally-identifiable information was shared between G-suite and Youtube). This breach lead Datatilsynet (the Danish Data Protection Agency) to investigate the municipality and conclude they hadn't done their due diligence in investigating privacy implication of the setup.
This forced the municipality to perform a through investigation of the privacy issues. Their findings in turn lead Datatilsynet to ban further use of G-suite an Chromebooks (in the municipality) because they found more serious issues, for example they couldn't guarantee private information was not shared with unsafe countries.
The choice of software and hardware is decided by each municipality, so there will be no nationwide ban as such. But underlying privacy problems will be the same for other municipalities which use the same software.
But that was due to misconfiguration. For example the kids could access and comment on youtube videos with their school accounts and when it did that the comments was posted with their full name and school/class name.
That misconfiguration is what triggered the investigation, but the investigation uncovered more severe problems, for example the municipality could not guarantee that private information was not transferred to unsafe countries.
Google have some setup where the data is stored in the EU (Ireland) and allegedly the encryption key is only available to the Ireland branch of Google and not the US branch. But the setup is still accessed by personnel from the US branch.
> Recently, Datatilsynet (the Danish Data Protection Authority) issued a ruling emphasizing the importance of conducting proper due diligence before implementing cloud services. We agree due diligence is an important step for customers since privacy assessments and outcomes can vary significantly based on the way customers have configured their system. Although this ruling is limited to Helsingør Municipality, it may be of interest to other Danish controllers. To be clear, the ruling does not apply to Google directly or to other customers, nor does it prohibit use of Google Workspace for Education or Chromebooks in Denmark.
The main points are that Elsinore concluded that the risks with using Google Workspace are low, but that it cannot be guaranteed that US authorities won't be able to get hold of the data. In order to be allowed to use Google Workspace, Elsinore must re-evaluate that position and be absolutely sure that such leaks cannot happen. This is the part that might have far-reaching consequences, since Elsinore -- and many others -- don't see that as possible.
I'm in no way an expert when it comes to GDPR, but there's a lot of people who're quite upset about this, since it means any school using Google Workspace is expected to prove data transfer to non-EU entities isn't possible without adequate protection.
GDPR is EU law. And unless some super lawyer shows up from Helsingørs kommune or more likely from Google then this goes not only for Denmark but the rest of the EU as well.
Normally a seller of a piece of software to an institution would provide the documentation, if nedeed, that the piece of software follows GDPR.
Now with Google, Helsingør likely gets the software for free. And Google takes the data and use it for targeting advertisement and maybe other things.
Personally I think the school system in Denmark should only use suppliers with a straight-forward pay and use business model.
Much in the same way I don't think our children's text books should contain advertisement or be sponsored by business or political interests.
But only one local county have been forbidden from processing personal data on school chromebooks as they did not do any analysis of the consequences.