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Too Poor to Afford the Internet

nytimes.com

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Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#61

Post by jcrawfordor »

koolba wrote: post #51

> They’re there during the school year, too, even during the winter — it’s the only way they can complete their online math homework. Why is there homework online? Has this been shown to be better in any way for children learning math or just a cop out by lazy teachers to be able to automatically grade the assignments? I can't imagine learning math with anything besides a pencil and paper (yes even calculators are mo…

School systems and colleges love these online services because they do most of the legwork (grading and grade management) completely automatically, which allows the instructor to have much larger section sizes (without having to hire grading staff). Pearson, the leading provider of these, likes to market them as better for teaching but everyone in education understands that what they're actually better for is bottom-line cost.

It's an extremely frustrating trend, particularly since on the whole students seem to uniformly despise these services, but education is highly budget-constrained and this is one of the areas where it really shows. It's either online homework or pay more in taxes/tuition.

Edit: while I'm making Pearson sound vaguely evil, I should mention that the cost of these services is usually mostly offset onto the students, as the textbooks come with a one-time-use activation code for the online service that effectively eliminates the used textbook market. Of course in K-12 public school systems, the taxpayers still end up footing the bill.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#62

Post by zzzcpan »

walrus01 wrote: post #48
drops wrote: post #13

Interesting. I live in a country with a minimum wage of $58 a month (Ukraine) and yet the internet is one of the few things that pretty much anyone can afford: high speed connections (50-100mbps) cost about $2-4; rarely more. Are american high prices the result of scummy pricing on the corporations' side or is it an actual infrastructural issue that prevents the ISPs from providing cheap connections to everyone?

1) it costs a great deal less in salary to pay construction workers to install aerial or buried fiber in ukraine. Or to aim point to point microwave. 2) A network engineeering position that might cost a company $115,000/year in the US could be filled for $35,000/year in Ukraine. 3) Eastern european ISPs are much more "Adventurous" in terms of the low cost network equipment they use for core infrastructure. $1500 Mikr…

> Eastern european ISPs are much more "Adventurous" in terms of the low cost network equipment

Well, unlike US ISPs, they try to compete on price and there is a lot of competition. They kind of have to be much more adventurous in terms of cutting down costs of network equipment. But they also compete on quality, so it has to satisfy that too or you are out.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#63

Post by skybrian »

koolba wrote: post #51

> They’re there during the school year, too, even during the winter — it’s the only way they can complete their online math homework. Why is there homework online? Has this been shown to be better in any way for children learning math or just a cop out by lazy teachers to be able to automatically grade the assignments? I can't imagine learning math with anything besides a pencil and paper (yes even calculators are mo…

If this were any other profession, you would not say "lazy teachers" but rather "efficient teachers."

The whole point of a productivity improvement is to free up time to spend in other ways. Maybe it's a false efficiency, but it's very cynical to assume than any time teachers can free up by being more efficient at grading will be simply wasted. Generally speaking, teachers have a lot of other things they could do.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#64

Post by obihill »

Would it make sense to give libraries a new lease on life and turn them into mini-coworking spaces with micro-finance credit? Apart from how they serve as a conduit for free internet, there could be opportunities to use them to encourage entrepreneurship in those areas that are currently under-represented. Maybe even something worth replicating in other locales.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#65

Post by chaostheory »

crazydoggers wrote: post #60
drops wrote: post #13

Interesting. I live in a country with a minimum wage of $58 a month (Ukraine) and yet the internet is one of the few things that pretty much anyone can afford: high speed connections (50-100mbps) cost about $2-4; rarely more. Are american high prices the result of scummy pricing on the corporations' side or is it an actual infrastructural issue that prevents the ISPs from providing cheap connections to everyone?

The minimum wage in US would be $1200 per month. So if the average price in the US is $55, that's about 4.5% of a monthly salary. Given your quoted numbers, the price in Ukraine is actually higher at 5% of a monthly salary. Of course the US doesn't have a monthly minimum wage (not sure how that works in Ukraine) so many people in the US might only have part time jobs paying the minimum hourly wage, hence they make co…

I could be wrong but I think it's actually lower in the US if you're only making minimum wage. Years ago it qualified you for a subsidized $19.99 plan.

UPDATE It seems to be even less today at $5-10: http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/22/technology/access-from-att-d...

It's strange that the article doesn't mention this.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#66

Post by Jach »

clumsysmurf wrote: post #56

I relied on my public library for internet access for years ... luckily though, I had my own computer. Do any libraries have some kind of persisted 'virtualized' environment that migrated between public-use machines? For example, at the library I was at, you could not install software you needed - things were pretty locked down. And one day you may use machine #5, another day it might be machine #10. Imagine you want…

Presumably the computers had a browser, that's all you need for learning JS programming.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#67

Post by tim333 »

It's because of stuff like this that I thought facebook free basics in India wasn't such a bad idea. At least the kids there would have been able to get Wikipedia which you can learn most stuff from.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#68

Post by escherize »

koolba wrote: post #51

> They’re there during the school year, too, even during the winter — it’s the only way they can complete their online math homework. Why is there homework online? Has this been shown to be better in any way for children learning math or just a cop out by lazy teachers to be able to automatically grade the assignments? I can't imagine learning math with anything besides a pencil and paper (yes even calculators are mo…

Do you actually believe the public school system's goal is to educate children? More like freeing up parents to go to work (and tax), and employing teachers and administrators. It's nearly impossible to fire teachers, thanks to a public sector union who's got their back.

School is like a prison for kids. One form of punishment is detention - more school.

Also, "In the 2000 report, commissioned by the American Association of University Women, surveyors asked students between eighth and 11th grades whether they had ever experienced inappropriate sexual conduct at school. The list of such conduct included lewd comments, exposure to pornography, peeping in the locker room, and sexual touching or grabbing. Around one in 10 students said they had been the victim of one or more such things from a teacher or other school employee, and two-thirds of those reported the incident involved physical contact." - http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...

So, asking if something the public school system is doing is student focused betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of its purpose.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#69

Post by superuser2 »

chatmasta wrote: post #12
jawns wrote: post #10

Can I just say how much I love the way public libraries have navigated themselves into the digital age? They are, as this piece points out, very popular places to access computers and the Internet, and many libraries offer a wealth of digital content. I can check out and instantly download e-books and audiobooks and movies from my library. It's certainly conceivable that they might have transitioned less well. There…

Public libraries are amazingly accessible, but university libraries remain complicit in the ongoing racket of pay-to-read academic literature. Although many university libraries allow guest access during the day, you cannot access their academic subscriptions unless you're on the secure wifi.

They have to be, as a condition of their journal subscriptions. Librarians generally want to extend access as far as possible, but they are terrified of pissing off a publisher and getting a journal taken away from their entire university's community of researchers who need it to do their work.

Re: Too Poor to Afford the Internet

#70

Post by linkregister »

rayiner wrote: post #28
drops wrote: post #13

Interesting. I live in a country with a minimum wage of $58 a month (Ukraine) and yet the internet is one of the few things that pretty much anyone can afford: high speed connections (50-100mbps) cost about $2-4; rarely more. Are american high prices the result of scummy pricing on the corporations' side or is it an actual infrastructural issue that prevents the ISPs from providing cheap connections to everyone?

The vast majority of the cost of any kind of infrastructure is labor, which scales with local wages.[1] A New York subway ticket is about $2.75. That's about 11x more than the cost of a ticket on the Kiev Metro. And it's not like the New York subway makes a profit--fares cover only about half the system's operating costs.[2] In Baltimore, I paid about $50 for a 50mbps connection, or about 20x more than a subway ticke…

How did you get that $50/50Mbps deal in Baltimore? Was this part of a bundle for cable television?
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