from the more-than-just-a-captive-audience-for-failed-proprietary-products dept.
The Times Higher Education has an essay by Professor Andy Farnell where he rethinks digital technologies which disenfranchise, dehumanize, excludes, and even bully both students and teachers. These unfortunate technologies with their problems and misfeatures have been plaguing institutions of higher education for quite some time now. Not too long ago, universities took the lead in creating and advancing performant technologies. The triumvirate of LDAP, Kerberos, and AFS is just one which comes to mind, though there are also the original Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) and many more. Now these institutions have mostly lost their way and have become followers and "consumers" of products that not only don't meet their needs but actively work against institutional goals. He starts by asking which digital technologies could, or rather ought to, be removed from higher educational environments.
Harm occurs when technologies divert equity away from key stakeholders toward powerful but marginal stakeholders, namely chancellors, trustees, directors, dignitaries, landlords, governments, industries, advertisers, sponsors, technology corporations, suppliers and publishers. Harms arise because these entities have become invested in pushing technologies that favour their products and interests into the education ecosystem.
Obviously, we can't entertain the idea of removing all technologies from education, if only to dodge the pedant's retort that we'd better burn all books and blackboards while we're at it. Rather than looking for technical errors, let's recognise that technologies are fraught with political and psychological shortcomings in their models, structures and behaviours, which lead to misuse.
As a brief summary, we wish to identify and eliminate systems that:
- disenfranchise and disempower
- dehumanise
- discriminate and exclude
- extract or seek rent
- coerce and bully
- mislead or manipulate
What steps can you take locally?
Recently:
(2022) 'NO': Grad Students Analyze, Hack, and Remove Under-Desk Surveillance Devices Designed to Track Them
Related Stories
Surveillance has been creeping unabated across schools, universities, and much of daily life over the past few years, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in October, however, graduate students at Northeastern University were able to organize and beat back an attempt at introducing invasive surveillance devices that were quietly placed under desks at their school.
Early in October, Senior Vice Provost David Luzzi installed motion sensors under all the desks at the school's Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Complex (ISEC), a facility used by graduate students and home to the "Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute" which studies surveillance. These sensors were installed at night—without student knowledge or consent—and when pressed for an explanation, students were told this was part of a study on "desk usage," according to a blog post by Max von Hippel, a Privacy Institute PhD candidate who wrote about the situation for the Tech Workers Coalition's newsletter.
[...] Von Hippel told Motherboard, however, that desk usage can already be tracked because desks are assigned and badges are required to enter the rooms. Instead, he believes the sensors were a rationale for the administration—which owns the building—to push out computer science students who don't use the building as much as others might.
In response, students began to raise concerns about the sensors, and an email was sent out by Luzzi attempting to address issues raised by students.
[...] At this first listening session, Luzzi asked that grad student attendees "trust the university since you trust them to give you a degree," Luzzi also maintained that "we are not doing any science here" as another defense of the decision to not seek IRB approval.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ox0000 on Monday December 26, @11:34PM (3 children)
We (rightfully) rail against regulatory capture frequently, but an equally insidious version of the same problem is corporate capture: when corporations dictate the agenda at institutions that should shape individuals into independent, critical beings then that's the foundation for problems X years from now. It lays a societal foundation of sand.
With these types of institutions being dependent on corporate dollars, directly or indirectly, this is the predicament we are stumbling into with our eyes open. Corporations typically do not want critical beings, they want obedient ones that spend on them, with the best case scenario having them of the ilk to have been conditioned to the new normal of having to obey
feudalcorporate lords having made serving other lord unthinkable in their minds.Plus ca change, plus ca reste le meme chose...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27, @09:11AM
Having recently exited academia, I can report it is moving headlong towards a commercial selling of branded educational products. The customers are foreign students in need of visas and the menial labor is supplied by what used to be academics - the dedicated people who wasted their youth learning their subject, rather than getting an MBA and inserting themselves as middle-men everywhere.
Universities where "students and teachers" are lumped together as the "disenfranchised" is no longer a university. It's a McUniversity where hired bullies (managers) raise fees and cut wages to put out cheap, fructose corn syrup-based, low nutrition, mechanically separated knowledge extract, and a gilded layer of administration make executive decisions to build rental units and hire superstar football players to elevate the brand. Yuck.
It's a system in decline. Recommend the following link: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-dangerous-academic-is-an-extinct-species [currentaffairs.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday December 27, @02:10PM (1 child)
Want != get. What's missing here are two factors. First, there is a conflation of motives with results. All kinds of wicked parties can want all the nasty stuff. But that doesn't mean they get it. Corporations don't have infinite power to bend the rest of us to their will.
Second, the fundamental dynamic here is that while schools can scratch all those itches, they also tend to create crap as a result. And my bet is that most of the faculty got tired long ago of trying to make do with that. When the code is good, it gets heavily adopted because schools and students are cheap. For example, nobody has an adequate closed source replacement for TeX and its variants (particularly LaTeX) in the niches where the latter is used. It's to the point that if you write papers in math or related areas in physics, economics, etc. you submit the paper to the journal, conference, etc as a LaTeX document. It's so much cleaner and visually appealing than the alternatives.
OTOH, I took a physics special studies lab part time at Clemson University back in 1991 (for an ignominious end to my undergraduate career, but I did graduate in four years as a result), and had to suffer through the class registration system (also used for a lot of other school admin tasks) they had at the time which was a homebrew menu-driven system on an IBM mainframe (using the peculiar IBM signature quirks such as the right control key being enter). Apparently, a lot of computer science majors cut their teeth on that thing.
Sure, corporations sell cheap or donate software with the intent that students used to their products will buy it later. And schools and students get cheap software. There's generally not a lot of drama to it - it mostly works and everyone is grown ups. Not a fulfillment of corporations' need for connotative feudalism.
My take also is that the disinterest in actually producing knowledgeable people is not due to corporate cooties pushing feudalistic products, but to Eisenhower's scientific-government complex - the interaction between academia and public funding where these schools evolve to prioritize copious funding and subsidized students loans over actually doing a good job - genuine education and academic/scientific endeavors.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28, @03:51AM
> these schools evolve to prioritize copious funding and subsidized students loans over actually doing a good job - genuine education and academic/scientific endeavors.
100%. There's nary the pretense any more. Professional grant writers, with the fig leaf of a science background, spin proposals to funding bodies on hot topics - not necessarily something they know much about. The lottery of funding means sometimes one "hits" and then a flood of foreign students are required to fulfill the contract, under the guise of them receiving an education. It's ironic that the students end up training their supervisors (if the latter even bothers to learn the topic)! Meanwhile, the grant writers are off trying to score more contracts...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 26, @11:44PM (2 children)
WTF do any of these have to do with what was written in the article?
Or was this all just part of the Axis of Evil that was IBM, CMU, and MIT?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27, @04:19AM (1 child)
They mean universities (such as cmu and mit) *used* to develop technologies that addressed their (and other universities') needs -- scratch their own itches, as it were.
In contrast, they lament the fact that these days that's no longer done; instead, universities' IT departments strongly prefer to buy (rather than build) their infrastructure. Staff members with a clue are to be avoided in favor of compliant know-nothings whose only job is to call tech support and let the vendor provide a "solution" to whatever the problem may be.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday December 27, @10:56AM
That'll be Microsoft, then?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday December 27, @01:48PM (4 children)
Why, yes, I *have* noticed that universities are less welcoming of digital visitors than the average motel or restaurant with free wifi. I don't know what the heck they think they're guarding against, preventing visitors from using wifi without getting some sort of official authorization and/ or permission in the form of an account with a password. Why isn't university wifi simply free, like the aforementioned commercial places? Maybe that's MAFIAA crap, wanting to tie traffic to individuals, so that an "illegal" download can be traced. Maybe FBI crap too, wanting to keep tabs on youth because everyone knows the young are more prone to disruptive behavior. Likely it's budgetary pressures, in which the university has to agree to surveillance, to get discounts on tech.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ox0000 on Tuesday December 27, @02:22PM (1 child)
Ain't a thing MBA's can't fuck up.
It's all about liability: if you have to click "I agree" to 57 pages of legalese (which no-one reads) saying you're allowed to go to http://example.org [example.org] (can't have that crazy https encryption now) and no-where else, and then you do go somewhere else, well now they can throw the book at you, lock you up, and destroy your future. It's wonderful to be able to dangle that over your head to 'encourage' compliance.
Sadly, what used to be Houses of Learning are more about re-enforcing compliant thinking and behavior these days, rather than encouraging critical, out-of-the-box thinking and behavior. For innovation of thought and action to be possible, we need more encouragement of deviant behavior & thought, for that is the only way progress can be made. Without innovation, by conserving the status quo, we move backward, we retard.
Encasing behavior in myriad punitive laws serves to control: a world in which every law is always enforced is a world in which everyone is a criminal; it is also a world that becomes stagnant and ossified, where changes to the laws due to changes in society are prohibited, because that would be 'encouraging' criminal behavior. In other words: for a police state, everybody must be guilty so that anybody can be charged at any time. Controlling behavior at the root, when it is contemplated, before it is executed, thus causing self-censorship of behavior and thought, criminalizing common behavior, achieves this.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28, @04:02AM
> what used to be Houses of Learning are more about re-enforcing compliant thinking and behavior these days
My theory is that the mass importation of foreign students from authoritarian countries, fresh out of their military-style education systems. ended up training the universities that they could treat students much worse and give them much less than a kid who grew up in America. Couple that with non-stop propaganda demonizing progressive attitudes, which are actually the foundation of any Western cultural superiority, and voila! Here we are.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Tuesday December 27, @02:31PM (1 child)
Why, yes, I *have* noticed that universities are less welcoming of digital visitors than the average motel or restaurant with free wifi.
The long and the short of it is that universities around the globe seem to have dropped the capability for zero-trust access to services and now rely on IPv4 addressing.
I'd say that your guess of MAFIAA is a good guess, and add that loss of agency and loss of skills are two additional factors. 1) There is always the boogieman of copyright infringement from illicit downloads scaring administrators and there is also the matter of various services like library databases and digital collections. 2) Digital services, including access to digital library collections, used to be done by logging in with your university credentials and thus access could be granted at the appropriate level regardless of location. More of that has been outsourced and as the universities lose control over that, so goes their ability to integrate with the university computing infrastructure. 3) Some no longer have much infrastructure left, to the point were your average small business has better. Then as tasks and services are outsourced, skilled people are fired or driven out, the ability to do that kind of authentication is lost.
So with no skills, outsourced services, and the unskilled bureaucrats now in charge of the infrastructure and jumping at shadows, the authentication and authorization becomes based on local IP addresses.
That creates a vicious cycle when various carpetbaggers (cough*cisco*cough) show up and sell their snake oil in the form of over-priced, Linux-blocking VPN software with outdated encryption. At that point IPv4 addresses are the only way to do authentication and authorization. They'd be better off using WireGuard or OpenVPN, but neither of those bloat budgets or allow obedient, trained monkeys to get on and stay on an empire builder's payroll. The empire builders stay and get raises based on bloated budgets and unnecessary staffing. In contrast, the faculty has begun to turn over at a high rate [currentaffairs.org] and thus lacks the time, clout, and incentive to bring the staff to heel.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday December 27, @03:47PM
Zero trust is not an easy environment to develop in. Given that the majority of uses for the network were traditionally experimental, it makes sense not to even try to get your students and faculty to adequately protect that stuff.
The appropriate solution here is to allow guest access that is firewalled out of communicating with any network peers. Guests don't need network access to the Kerberos-authenticated file servers, and they definitely don't need access to the unsecured hacking tool that the first year CS student is hosting out of their dorm, or the shared-password-protected admin plane for an experimental AI platform.
Not that you're necessarily wrong. I just think that even if none of that was a problem, I still wouldn't have wanted randos probing the network that my university gave me when I was in school.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Tuesday December 27, @05:19PM (2 children)
This is just part of the real problem: university administration is subject to Pournelle's Iron Law, just like any other organization.
At my school, we used to have roughly a 60/40 split, teaching staff/other staff. It's now the other way around. Look at in numbers: for 6 teaching staff, there used to he 4 non-teaching. Now, for that same 6 teaching staff there are *9* others. That is a doubling of overhead.
We also have all sorts of new and fancy digital tools, like those mentioned on TFA. Mostly, they are designed to benefit the administration. A huge and stupidly complex SharePoint site. An online portal into SAP. And so forth. None of these newer tools are primarily intended to support the school's primary mission of education.
It reminds me very much of that famous saying: "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday December 27, @05:46PM (1 child)
A supporting anecdote for that, a faculty member at one place I asked about commented at his institution over 70% of the budget went to overhead and not to either teaching or research. SAP, M$, Cisco, etc are all part of that because they not only do not aid in achieving either goal but actively impair pursuit of those goals. Other places I have followed have also had massive bloat and proliferation of administration and administrators at the cost of the two core missions, even going back to the late 1990s.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Touché) by bradley13 on Tuesday December 27, @09:22PM
The problem, of course, is that decisions about administrative spending are made...by the administration.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday December 27, @09:05PM (1 child)
IMHO, this is worth a read. As it relates to technology, I agree with the author on several points. Convenience/privacy/security tradeoff decisions do have serious impact, and those impacts should be considered. On a more personal level this paper revealed one of my own strong implicit biases. I found myself instinctively glazing over in response to the high diversity and inclusion keyword density. I had to actively quash the instinct to dig into both TFS&P; That's a real blind spot I didn't know I had.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28, @04:06AM
Huh, the propaganda works. Who knew?!