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Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

nytimes.com

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Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#61

Post by webwanderings »

danblick wrote: post #39
webwanderings wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the invention of printing press made them a monopoly? Google does not generate information; they facilitate it. The more the information is free, the more it will be converted to knowledge by these same schools and students. Your comparison of it to your values of buying things for yourself, is misleading.

I'm glad you're questioning that assertion, but I don't think your counter-argument is very convincing. The economics of the printing press were different than the economics facing Google. For example: Google search benefits from network effects (clicks are used to improve future search results). Google mostly provides information goods (zero marginal cost of production), but books aren't really a perfect information…

I don't know what your definition of "perfect information good" really is, but books have been converting information into knowledge for hundreds of years. Before the printing press, scribes used to hand-duplicate. The invention of printing press effectively changed the whole scene (just as the searching on the Internet changed Internet). Irrespective of the concerns of privacy etc, Google provides the best sauce of technology which facilitates searching the information (which converts to knowledge). As far as I can see, Google isn't in the business of creating knowledge.

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#62

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

bushin wrote: post #49
Eridrus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably taking his off-hand remarks too seriously, but I don't think anyone really uses the quadratic equation for anything. Quadratic functions definitely come up, and the derivation of the quadratic formula is definitely useful to learn, but the formula itself seems like a mathematical dead end. In general I think being forced to learn things with no clear application is part of why the school system fails…

According to the Abel–Ruffini theorem the formula for fourth-degree equations is a dead end :)

Do you mean fifth degree?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartic_function#General_formu...

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#63

Post by stephenr »

matt2000 wrote: post #30

A couple personal anecdotes related to this: I volunteer at a school to help maintain around 300 iPads and ~20 iMacs. It's awful. (I am a longtime Mac user at home BTW). The management tools around updating the iPads, installing apps, and configuring users are all terrible, unreliable and old. It leads to teacher frustration and less use of the equipment in the classroom. The only thing worse are the windows computer…

isn't this exactly what macOS server and MDM is for?

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#64

Post by skybrian »

Gaelan wrote: post #53

15 yo high school student here; we have Google Apps accounts and use chromebooks every once and a while. The district has carts of chromebooks that are brought in when students need to do research or work on projects in class. They work pretty well. (The district also has Mac Minis, which are used by the teachers and in the library; they are imaged to Windows if the teacher chooses.) Happy to answer any questions.

Do you use them for having fun or just for homework? What other computers do you use?

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#65

Post by dkarapetyan »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #25

I have mixed feelings about this. Personally, working as a contractor at Google was one of the interesting jobs I have had and I generally like Google. That said, after reading Dave Eggers' excellent book "The Circle" last year and having watched the movie yesterday, I was reminded of the dangers (even if fictional in the case of the book) of a monopoly controlling knowledge. The book/movie is obviously about Google…

I also think it is kinda backwards that a for-profit corporation is subsidizing public education. This is a symptom of a broken system and instead of praising Google we should fix what is broken about the system. This also creates an interesting precedent if it sticks. Are parents going to beg Google to prop up their schools now?

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#66

Post by jtraffic »

Eridrus wrote: post #35
jtraffic wrote: post #12

> I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don’t know why they are learning it This sounds disingenuous to me. There are lots of things kids and college students and adults learn that have no immediately foreseeable application. I'm sure most people on HN have thought about it. I wonder what the consensus is. My take is that learning how to use technology should not be a class…

This is probably taking his off-hand remarks too seriously, but I don't think anyone really uses the quadratic equation for anything. Quadratic functions definitely come up, and the derivation of the quadratic formula is definitely useful to learn, but the formula itself seems like a mathematical dead end. In general I think being forced to learn things with no clear application is part of why the school system fails…

I see your position. We should acknowledge that both sides of this are well-trodden, and the article even touches on it:

"It puts Google, and the tech economy, at the center of one of the great debates that has raged in American education for more than a century: whether the purpose of public schools is to turn out knowledgeable citizens or skilled workers."

I guess over time I've started leaning more toward "knowledgeable citizens," but I don't know why they need to be mutually exclusive.

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#67

Post by smichel17 »

zanny wrote: post #44
xnzakg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about engineers. Of course you need to understand some formulas if you're going to be an engineer. But for most of the people who aren't going to do that, they're useless.

Except the quadratic formula, just as an example, has a lot of positive qualities when taught to children: * The longform is fairly complex, so it is non-trivial to remember or recount. You can't just guess it (at least without knowledge well beyond it). So it looks like "magic". * It is a great introduction to what formulas are. They are non-trivial proofs of concepts that took research and logic to conclude. Learni…

One of my teachers back in high school made a comment to the effect of: "This class isn't about learning math. It's about practicing critical thinking skills."

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#68

Post by dkarapetyan »

WalterBright wrote: post #20

> he said: “I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don’t know why they are learning it.” He added, “And I don’t know why they can’t ask Google for the answer if the answer is right there.” Wow. Back when I worked for Boeing on the 757 design, there were engineers that were "formula pluggers" who pulled formulas out of manuals and used them. Then there were engineers who unde…

It is not in Google's best interest to have people that think independently of Google. The more woven Google is into the daily fabric of our lives the more profitable it becomes. I don't understand why more alarm bells aren't ringing. A for-profit corporation should not be subsidizing public education. They're not a non-profit. Their motives are always going to be at odds with creating a free-thinking populace.

Google and Google products are not commodified and generic tools of thought. In fact they are the exact opposite. They're contextualized and proprietary. We are doing ourselves a disservice in the long run by letting them get a leg up in education.

The best thing that happened to me was learning math in post-soviet Armenia. To this day I still think best with pencil and paper and can put other computational tools in the proper context. Whereas growing up with Google branded products I imagine would have had a much different effect. There was one thing the communists got right and that was science education.

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#69

Post by danblick »

webwanderings wrote: post #61
danblick wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad you're questioning that assertion, but I don't think your counter-argument is very convincing. The economics of the printing press were different than the economics facing Google. For example: Google search benefits from network effects (clicks are used to improve future search results). Google mostly provides information goods (zero marginal cost of production), but books aren't really a perfect information…

I don't know what your definition of "perfect information good" really is, but books have been converting information into knowledge for hundreds of years. Before the printing press, scribes used to hand-duplicate. The invention of printing press effectively changed the whole scene (just as the searching on the Internet changed Internet). Irrespective of the concerns of privacy etc, Google provides the best sauce of…

The term "information good" is from economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_good

An information good is one for which it's very cheap to produce additional units. Unfortunately, I'm probably abusing the term, since books are listed as an example of information goods. The idea is that most of the cost of producing the book goes into the content (writing, editing, etc.) and actually printing one additional book is cheap. (When I said books are "imperfect" information goods I meant that they still require paper and shipping and retailing and such, but it's probably just a bad use of the term.)

There's a fantastic book about the economics of information goods called "Information Rules" ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/087584863X ). Software is an information good so this covers some topics relevant to the digital economy. My favorite part is the chapter on lock-in. In particular the discussion around the equation:

profits from a customer = quality advantage + switching costs

which puts "(marginal) goodness of your product" on equal footing with "pain you can inflict on your customer for leaving".

Re: Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

#70

Post by duality »

thrillerson wrote: post #54

Chromebooks are much better than iPads for this kind of a task for sure, but I wouldn't want everything my child wrote and looked up throughout his development sent to a major advertising corp. This data should still be maintained by the school or by a company the school partners with with a zero internal or external sharing policy.

It seems to be maintained by a company the schools partner with with a zero internal or external sharing policy:

From [Common questions about Classroom](https://support.google.com/edu/classroom/answer/6025224?hl=e...)

Does Classroom contain ads? No. Like all G Suite for Education services, Classroom contains no ads and never uses your content or student data for advertising purposes. Learn more about [privacy and security](https://edu.google.com/trust/).

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