Daughter dug further and found the doc text (so proud) and it was a outline with loren ipsum in it. Dated 3 minutes before the corruption.
This started the chain of events where one student was no longer in class, teacher was flabbergasted at stupidity for zero gain, and then kid not being in school anymore (I guess was not first issue). Uni it department also checked and verified and added to autoscans in monopoly software. Daughter got full credit for assignment since she had noting to peer review.
I should of been suspicious, I haven't seen a corrupted small file in years.
Hackerman is there but so is overly qualified accidental white hat
I took my "job" very seriously. Started though because I was absolute always playing around on every system, which meant admin / root access, from the big local educational BBS to the library systems to the academic support stuff (I never played around with the grading system at all thankfully because most of the time it was just because I was blocked from doing something like use a disk in a drive or whatever).
Whoever setup these systems did things like whitelist apps, so if you wanted to use windows calculator it was blocked. So I'd jump into admin and run it from there. Nothing malicious. But I think they did have a bit of a debate (in hindsight) about which way to go, discipline or rope me in. I think the librarians carried the day actually because I'd been helping them with the netware stuff when I was in library hour (printers not printing / computers not working right / whatever).
I'm not in education software myself but it seems to me a solution of sorts would be to push for standardization:
- open data exchange formats
- open communication protocols
- open social identity platforms
This doesn't fix the problem but at least it gives power to the people to do so. However, it won't happen on its own because it's not in the best interest of anyone currently in position to do anything about it.
Fortunately, many universities are moving to other platforms. Where I am now we use canvas, which is open source and really like night and day compared to blackboard. I also heard good things about moodle (another OSS solution).
Documentation is also refreshingly comprehensive and up to date.
- TurnItIn is a 3rd party Blackboard extension and the school selected to use this.
- The school was also likely self hosting an under provisioned system.
- The university was not self-hosting as far as I know. I was not in the IT department, so would not know 100%, but in my interactions with IT they said that the service was hosted by blackboard and we had limited control over the system, e.g. pretty much every issue had to be escalated to blackboard.
While I can't speak for the specific formats and protocols they use, they're a non-profit, are founded & governed by educational institutions, and develop their service using an open source software model.
Those aren't guaranteed to result in a better result for users and institutions of course, but they would seem to avoid some of the worst-case scenarios that fee-based for-profit platforms might find themselves developing into.
That's only part of the solution though. Even if EdX, as far as it goes, is an open platform, someone needs to run and support it for schools, you need email and doc sharing, etc. etc. It's fine to say that everyone should just run Linux, OpenOffice, and so forth and just shrug if that's too complicated for a lot of students and teachers. But that's not an actual solution.
In principle, the government at some level could do its own collaborative/learning software and host it but people would perhaps rightly then ask why the government isn't using readily available commercial off the shelf software like most companies do.
My experience over the past nine months is that there are a lot of platforms with work pretty well with experience facilitators for a modest-sized group. And nothing that is really very satisfactory for interactivity at scale, especially with a heterogeneous audience (except in the most glancing way like poll questions).
I agree that interactivity at scale is super difficult. The problem is that in a course you are teaching more or less solved problems to bring students up to speed to where the field is. So the same questions get asked from class to class and group to group. There's the idea that you can compile all this knowledge and questions and then provide that as a resource to students. But actually the hardship of getting through those questions, even though they are the same, is how they learn. So the resources are nice for instructors but not as useful for students directly. There's definitely a lot of space for innovation but most of the people doing that either lack the technical expertise of developers etc because they come from education departments or they lack the domain knowledge of education research. There's a somewhat large space to fill with people who are good at both.
0: https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/learning-tools-interopera...
When the response to your question to the customer of "what features do you want" is "every part of my job I don't like" it's going to end up that way. Or you'll loose the bullet list bingo during aquisition.
And if someone's tiredness is, as you apparently believe, the most important criterion for whether something gets written, allow me to point out that I'm tired of the "don't bring me problems, bring me solutions" routine. I associate it with bad, authoritarian managers. And I think it's even less justifiable when the complainer a) isn't who the article was addressed to, and b) is complaining about a problem without offering a solution.
I find it is whether this is concerning to a person that typically indicates how they feel about things like in the article.
So the “solutions” are about dealing with a large quantity of multinational corporations as opposed to education or other things.
Do we continue to try to unify governments globally as was done with the EU?
Do we’re work towards international trade agreements to standardize the rules for these corporations such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership?
Do we limit the size vertical integration of corporations via anti-trust regulations?
There are also other potential tools, but in reality this is a difficult modern problem that will likely define the direction of the next hundred years of human history. Personally that feels important enough to me to keep an open dialogue as we search for solutions and identify specific issues to the current situation.
Besides, plenty of work has already gone into proposing solutions to monopolies, it's more likely that you just don't like any of them. What must be done now? To me it seems the best thing is for you to come up with a solution you like, since only you know best.
I think that’s what OP is criticizing the author for. It’s far easier to point out problems (especially when lots of other people have already written about them) than it is to suggest a solution.
Highlighting a problem is very valuable. Enumerating solutions is a completely different issue and often requires completely different skillsets.
The argument "don't talk about a problem if you don't have a solution" is a logical fallacy.
> I know nothing about the education system beyond this post
...
They already know what the solution is, but they pretend it's impossible in the premise of their argument, so they don't have to face reality and actually start building it.
Similarly, anyone could enumerate the good, right?
Let's start here.
I've gone searching for solutions (in the specific field of dyslexia education) but haven't been able to find much, or vet what I found. But I found two things. If you can find more, let's start a public list.
A Digital App to Aid Detection, Monitoring, and Management of Dyslexia in Young Children (DIMMAND): Protocol for a Digital Health and Education Solution
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5981053/
Our digital tools for kids with dyslexia
https://www.irislink.com/EN-US/c1849/IRIS---Digital-tools-fo...
Amen. It seems like 99.9% of all online content that address already well-known problems are like this. I find myself increasingly tuning out, no matter how well-written, if there isn't a good portion dedicated to actual solutions.
Too bad the capitalists came in and locked schools into pricey purchase agreements that required slick new books to be re-purchased every couple of years and started to drain our school budgets.
Analyzing the situation before schools ever used cloud platforms and why these platforms are alluring to begin with should be a big part of this discussion, because you must understand how you got here to ever understand where to go.
For example, when I was high school in the early 2000s, the most advanced setup my high school had was for students to use USB sticks or email the teachers assignments, and it sucked for everyone. The teachers each came up with their own effort to track files. And there was a lot of work for teachers, e.g. students forgetting to attach the file. Or, a clever hackerman such as myself, deleting a couple bytes in the file before attaching it to buy myself an extra day.
In university, the school used Blackboard which is apparently very expensive and definitely very underwhelming.
After those two experiences, I'm not surprised that Google suite is a true breath of fresh air for schools and students alike. I know nothing about the education system beyond this post, so I would love to hear something more informative about the situation than "capitalism bad".