[HN Gopher] Sh1mmer - An exploit capable of unenrolling enterpri...
___________________________________________________________________
Sh1mmer - An exploit capable of unenrolling enterprise-managed
Chromebooks
Author : XionXIV
Score : 205 points
Date : 2023-01-30 12:40 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sh1mmer.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (sh1mmer.me)
| bertil wrote:
| I stand with everyone on Hacker News in admiration for young'uns
| sticking it to the man and learning about command-line secret
| power.
|
| _However_, I'm a little more ambivalent knowing that most of them
| do that to look at naked ladies, presumably. Maybe create
| pictures of naked ladies (again: very impressed by Generative AI,
| with the caveat that it's widely used for pr0n)
|
| That doesn't feel ideal for the emotional maturation of middle-
| schooler. In my time ::shakes fists at cloud::, hacking the
| school network meant you risk exposing yourself to people with
| strong opinions about plot points in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
| Nowadays, it also means risking ending on a psyops from Russian
| secret service, whatever Andrew Tate is (and please, don't tell
| me: that's one shred of innocence I want to keep) or,
| inexplicable, worse. I remember ridiculing music producers who
| were saying that if you didn't pay for CDs, you would end up
| empowering "pedonazis". That felt ridiculous at the time. It
| feels less so now, both not paying for music and enabling actual
| pedophiles and actual nazis by sticking blindly to open-web
| principles.
|
| I am very happy that the kids stick it to the man. I feel like we
| grey manes need to put our heads together and think about how we
| talk to them about emotional maturation, bad people, and safely
| exploring. It will sound ridiculous coming from the generation
| that cared about Facebook, but I feel like we can't just stand in
| the bleachers and clap every time the JV red team scores a point.
| npteljes wrote:
| >hacking the school network meant you risk exposing yourself to
| people with strong opinions about plot points in Buffy The
| Vampire Slayer
|
| Not really, porn and gore were integral parts of the internet
| even "back then". Rotten.com launched in 1996 for example,
| Ogrish at 2000. Eating disorders are also fluorishing in the
| current era, on TikTok for one, but I remember the pro-ana
| websites from my youth as well, distributed on private
| websites, because creating a website or blog was easy. It was
| also very easy to find porn, even if specific websites were
| banned on your network, because it was just everywhere. Peer to
| peer networks also happily distrubuted whatever, let that be
| gore, hardcore porn, or any illegal thing you can think of,
| including abuse material.
|
| I do agree about your conclusion though. Emotional maturation,
| strong connection to people matter a lot, and a lot of the
| horrors are created specifically when these are missing from
| one's life.
| bertil wrote:
| Technically, I was talking about the late 80s, early 90s. But
| Buffy did start in 1997, so I guess I was reading about
| Warhammer alternative rules at the time? Probably not very
| healthy either.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| > Emotional maturation, strong connection to people matter a
| lot
|
| The first time I got called to the office was as a freshman
| in high school for fixing the 4 computer lab computers
| another kid had borked. That was Windows 3.0 and there was no
| network. The vice principal sat us down together and said the
| other kid was headed for a life of trouble and should be more
| like me. It was his considered opinion that I would go on to
| solve computer problems for a living and get paid $100,000.
| Honestly, I was way more impressed with him than myself.
| Unfortunately I went to medical school and never got to solve
| other people's computer problems for money. I mean, I solve
| computer problems for people, I get paid, but those two
| events are thoroughly decoupled.
|
| I now have a 17 year old and a 21 year old. I think they are
| more aware of their maturity level than I was. They sit
| around and think of what they are probably capable of doing.
| Which is a level of introspection I rarely have even today.
| npteljes wrote:
| This kind of introspection sounds like a good thing to me
| too.
| knodi123 wrote:
| > In my time ::shakes fists at cloud::, hacking the school
| network meant you risk exposing yourself to people with strong
| opinions about plot points in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
|
| lol. In my time, hacking the school network meant you could
| access programs that belonged to other schools, or print to
| their printers. And that was pretty much it.
| Taywee wrote:
| In my time, hacking the school network meant you could put
| cracked versions of Starcraft and Diablo II into the public
| drives and turn CAD class into a LAN party.
| rlmineing_dead wrote:
| Modern day applocker bypasses are fun, dump the registry,
| look for path exceptions you can write too, profit
| rlmineing_dead wrote:
| Um, we didn't create the exploit to look at porn, that should
| be blocked on the network level anyways
| bertil wrote:
| I guess people making and hacking those things are smarter
| than me. That's a good thing.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| The kids will figure it out like you did. Maybe the terrain has
| changed, but there was noone to tell you whats what back in the
| day anyway, so why worry? Or rather, emotional maturity can go
| both ways here: jumping to a paternalistic mindset will rob you
| the wisdom the kids themselves can give. I think its natural
| and probably right to feel concern, but don't overcorrect it
| into presumption or into a false idea that you can just give to
| kids what you had to learn/discover yourself.
| XionXIV wrote:
| This really is not something that I have thought about very
| much as they very likely have phones where they are able to
| view all of the same content, anyway.
| rlmineing_dead wrote:
| Why would you watch porn at school
| jonfw wrote:
| Kids are dumb
| XionXIV wrote:
| ???
| bertil wrote:
| My mobile provider has an adult filter that has a strong
| opinion about the maturity level of Cory Doctorow, so I trip
| upon that porn filter more often than I'd like. I never asked
| to have it, but it was there. I tried to take it off once
| because it felt ridiculous and violently ironic to have to
| put stuff on Pocket to read about the latest fuck-up in
| copyright. Still, I literally couldn't figure out to play the
| real-life role-playing game of saying the right thing each
| one of to the unending stream of customer service reps on the
| phone.
|
| Wouldn't parents set up something similar when they first get
| a contract for their kids? If I had mine on by default,
| wouldn't they insist on having one?
| lol768 wrote:
| This is hilarious, and quite impressive given the presumed age of
| the kids that'd be interested in doing this. I'm sure some K-12
| tech staff are stressing over the exploit right now.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| They're K-12 IT staff... they've got 900 other things to worry
| about.
|
| If someone is smart enough to find this and unenroll their
| device, they're probably smart enough to be left to their own
| devices. (Literally)
| kotaKat wrote:
| Except then they're going to spread the exploit. Kids don't
| keep their mouths shut. Then word goes around Jimmy knows how
| to kill the lock and get Roblox again on his Chromebook and
| suddenly there's a problem because now the flash drives and
| instructions are pared down and now half your class's
| Chromebooks just went unmanaged. They won't think or
| understand the repercussions (like not being able to suddenly
| start a managed test), just that they got their games back,
| and now it becomes the teacher's problem to troubleshoot
| again...
|
| Trust me, I know. I was one of those kids. Except back in my
| time I was running my own RDP server to get around the proxy
| servers while also hosting a Web server that had Ultrasurf on
| it for the others.
|
| The one thing I _didn 't_ share or open my mouth about? My
| exploit to kill Faronics Insight. Sure, my machine would
| suddenly show 'offline', but the lab monitors inherently
| trusted me in general ;)
|
| (And to Mrs. Remington, if you're out there on HN somehow,
| I'm sorry I was your little IT nightmare!)
| ethbr0 wrote:
| So was I, but that's the point of instilling a culture of
| "you break it, you deal with the consequences."
|
| Getting a zero on your next hw/quiz/lab/test, because your
| machine was non-compliant and you didn't know how to switch
| it back, is fair.
|
| Then reimage the machine on IT's timeline.
|
| And if mom and dad want to bitch, they deserve to be told
| that little Timmy screwed up his own laptop.
| derefr wrote:
| I would note that "screwing up your laptop" for a test
| written online, is a lot like "screwing up your pencil"
| for a test written on paper. A laptop can be borked, but
| it can also just have keys that break off, or other
| damage, some of which might be entirely accidental.
| Likewise, a student might snap their pencil in half or
| forget to bring it or grind it down to an unusable nub,
| but they also might just have a crap pencil where the
| lead got broken into little bits on the inside during
| shipping.
|
| In the case of the pencil, I'd expect the student to just
| put up their hand and ask for a pencil to do the test
| with; and the teacher to begrudgingly provide them one--
| mostly due to the possibility of the accidental case.
|
| Would that not be the case for school-issued laptops --
| just grab one from some cart of "extras" and tell the
| student to log into that one to do the test?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Fair point. In my mind, breaking your school laptop by
| modifying it is a bit like breaking your pencil by using
| it as a crowbar. Or if I used my textbook to level a
| table and the pages got stuck together.
|
| The school owes you a working device, if they give
| device-requiring assignments.
|
| But the responsibility passes to you once you modify or
| use that device outside of its default settings.
|
| Which, IMHO, would be a great life lesson to teach!
| e12e wrote:
| Seems the site is struggling - archive cache:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230130125805/https://sh1mmer.m...
|
| Github:
|
| https://github.com/CoolElectronics/sh1mmer
| mlatu wrote:
| thank you kind person, my network operator seems to have
| blocked this site
| mindondrugs wrote:
| Is there a source for `bored kids`? I dont see any evidence of
| kids creating this exploit?
| rlmineing_dead wrote:
| Hi, I'm the owner of mercury, everyone who made this exploit is
| under 17 and was bored so yes, it's bored kids
| amself wrote:
| https://sh1mmer.me/credits.html
| runjake wrote:
| I don't know how to prove it, because I don't want to post
| screenshots or other identifying info, but I've been in
| communication with a couple members of the sh1mmer crew. After
| posting some technical info about it on Reddit, they reached
| out.
|
| They claim to be in high school, and the way they converse
| seems to match.
|
| They're good kids. Good hackers.
| XionXIV wrote:
| You might've talked to me.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| I don't see any although the FAQ page certainly reads like it's
| written by somebody young.
| mikelovenotwar wrote:
| We're all someones kid
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| Life of Brian moment: "I'm not"
| frebord wrote:
| Lol
| kuroguro wrote:
| And we do get bored sometimes
| aliqot wrote:
| Hell im bored right now
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Yeah but were you a kid? You could be a GPT3 bot
| XionXIV wrote:
| I am one of the creators of shimmer. Can vouch that I am a
| bored kid.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Anyone else suddenly imagining that you hear Pink Floyd lyrics?
| gibspaulding wrote:
| I thought this was fairly doable for some time. Surprised it
| hasn't been an issue before.
|
| I used to do tech support for a school district with some ~5000
| Chromebooks in circulation and we did all of our repairs in
| house. This meant I spent the first few weeks of COVID bringing
| home boxes of damaged devices and spare parts and getting them
| back into working order. Occasionally I would have to do a board
| swap for a bad power jack or something which meant you would have
| to overwrite the serial number on the new board to match the old
| one so that it would join Google admin as one of our devices. If
| I remember right the process would have worked the other way
| around too, to change the serial number to one we didn't control.
| offlinehacker wrote:
| I like the attitude these kinds have. No one should have control
| over my laptop, but me. Being locked in corporate silos is way
| too normal these days.
| XionXIV wrote:
| :]
| XionXIV wrote:
| And it just takes two minutes.
| XionXIV wrote:
| The silliest thing about it is probably this. Google seemed to
| have just kind of forgotten to add code that would verify the
| rootfs on shims, even though they had everything they needed to
| do it already set up.
|
| https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromiumos/platfo...
| andromeduck wrote:
| That patch seems to be just checking more devices/partitions
| for images?
| XionXIV wrote:
| I'm not sure how to explain what is going on in there, but
| that is the patch for shimmer.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| I hope I don't sound like a Luddite, but I don't think kids
| should have chrome books, or any type of laptops in school...
| lynx23 wrote:
| What do you suggest instead? Write on stone tablets?
| 1317 wrote:
| paper, perhaps?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| To what end?
|
| In a professional environment, the last time I wrote on
| paper is when my computer was in for maintenance. That's
| like having students use hand-slates in the era of paper.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I work as an engineer in an office and use a paper
| notebook every day. The paper is a great help for
| thinking out loud and for taking notes.
| asda_ wrote:
| What an exaggeration. I use a pen and paper to take notes
| all the time at work as a dev. Let's face it most kids
| are just distracting themselves with a chromebook if
| they're using it in class.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| Writing notes by hand has been proven to increase
| understanding and retention. Unless we're giving kids OCR
| tablets, they're learning less taking notes on a
| keyboard.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I believe this train of thought jumped to a conclusion
| not supported by the evidence: does taking notes on
| computer _not_ increase understanding and retention?
|
| Because anecdotally: I retain more when I take notes on
| laptop than if I took no notes. I also retain more when I
| take notes on laptop than if I took notes on paper
| because my typing speed can keep up with the topic and my
| writing speed cannot.
| troupe wrote:
| To support your claim see Mueller & Oppenheimer's
| research from 2014. The big issue is that while the
| laptop lets people capture MORE of the words said, the
| process of filtering is how the mind consolidates
| information. Taking notes require you to decide what to
| leave out and that is what helps you remember.
| jksk61 wrote:
| There are different reason to favour handwriting: 1.
| Development coordiantion eye-hand; 2. Computers can go to
| maintenance as you said; 3. Creativity, how many times
| did you doodle on a white word file? 4. They'll have
| plenty of times in uni/job to stare blankly at a LCD
| screen 5. Paper is less tiresome on eyes.
| [deleted]
| bitwize wrote:
| Reeking purple worksheets fresh off the mimeograph machine,
| just like God intended. And make the little brats write in
| cursive.
|
| We also have a golden opportunity to teach them where "cut"
| and "paste" on their parents' computers come from, using
| real scissors and actual nasty, lumpy paste.
| blitzar wrote:
| > teach them where "cut" and "paste" on their parents'
| computers come from
|
| Apple invented it for iOS 3.0 in 2009.
| [deleted]
| 31337Logic wrote:
| False dichotomy. Nice try.
| blitzar wrote:
| The introduction of the roller ball pen over the
| traditional quill almost certainly was met with the same
| "wont somebody think of the children"
| Symbiote wrote:
| Quill pens were replaced in the early to mid 19th century
| by dip pens with a manufactured metal nib. The much
| reduced cost compared to quills gave a huge boost to
| literacy.
|
| Fountain pens were an older invention, but poor
| reliability and cost kept them out of common use before
| the early 20th century.
|
| I doubt either progression was controversial. Basic
| penmanship is similar with all of these.
|
| Ballpoint pens gained popularity around the 1960s. That
| was (and is) controversial -- ballpoint pens require much
| more pressure, so they are less comfortable for lengthy
| writing, and it's more difficult to write neatly.
|
| Children in some countries are therefore still required
| to use fountain pens at school.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| When I was in high school the district bought 1,000s of
| PalmPilots and we had to learn Graffiti. :D
|
| (Thankfully it was just a short lived fad and they all
| gathered dust in storage fairly quickly.)
| icepat wrote:
| Why? As a student, giving me access to a laptop improved my
| ability to get things done by orders of magnitude. I always
| struggled with messy writing, and being distracted easily.
| Having a laptop let me pay better attention, because I could
| work on something and passively listen to the class. My notes
| were also legible, meaning I could take meaningful notes for
| the first time ever. I could also combine photos of the
| chalkboard with captions on days I was particularly distracted,
| or record important sections of the class and review it later.
|
| If I had to sit with just a notebook, and listen to the class
| only, I'd rapidly become sidetracked and check completely out.
| Then when it came to writing things down that were important,
| I'd have to check back in, and quickly jot things down that
| were illegible.
|
| Massively improved my retention, and overall ability to
| function in class.
|
| The "no computers, computers bad" mentality in schools is a
| major limiting factor for people with different learning
| styles, and neurodivergent children.
| logifail wrote:
| > I could work on something and passively listen to the class
|
| (This is a genuine question) What were the benefits of being
| in class if you're basically doing something else and not
| actively listening?
|
| Compared with, say, sitting in the library (or indeed at
| home), working on the same thing, without the potential
| distraction of what the rest of your class was doing?
| icepat wrote:
| Active listening is something I'm completely incapable of
| doing in a traditional way. When I have an activity in
| front of me, for example code or an interesting task, I
| listen better and am more engaged. When I was younger, I
| had a specific teacher who'd assume I was not paying
| attention, and ask me to answer often. Much to his
| surprise, I was fully engaged and able to respond.
|
| It's just a different learning style. I'm actively
| listening, but in a more passive way than normal, if that
| makes any sense.
|
| > Compared with, say, sitting in the library (or indeed at
| home), working on the same thing, without the potential
| distraction of what the rest of your class was doing?
|
| In University I'd often skip class specifically to do this.
| Worked far better for me than sitting in a lecture hall.
| Let me work at my own pace, take breaks, walk around, ect.
| Classes with mandatory attendance were the bane of my
| existence. Intentionally designing courses to require
| attendance by not providing complete notes, or incomplete
| textbooks, also caused me issues.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Your case is very unusual, and should be dealt with
| separately. It's not at all reasonable to make
| generalizations to all children from a single
| neurodivergent child.
|
| (In England your teacher would ask the school's special
| education teacher for advice. You might end up with a
| laptop, or something else that helps, essentially on
| prescription from an educational psychologist. Class
| teachers would be given guidance on when and how you can
| or should use it.)
| icepat wrote:
| Not saying it is not, but what I am saying is that you
| should be allowed whatever learning tools work best for
| you. A blanket ban on computers and insisting on hand
| written notes, is just no good. Forcing children to
| manage bureaucracy to get a simple laptop in class is
| also senseless.
|
| > In England your teacher would ask the school's special
| education teacher for advice
|
| In Canada, they just said I wasn't trying hard enough. I
| can't count the number of times people fought me tooth
| and nail to prevent me learning in the way that suited me
| best. You would like to assume that teachers and school
| administrators are looking for the best way to educate
| people, but sadly that's not always the case. It often
| breaks down into a bureaucracy of "well, you don't have
| xyz condition, and we only allow this for xyz condition,
| so you don't get it." Another one I got was "we won't let
| you have a laptop because we're liable if it gets
| broken".
| logifail wrote:
| > I am saying is that you should be allowed whatever
| learning tools work best for you. A blanket ban on
| computers and insisting on hand written notes, is just no
| good.
|
| Umm, not sure whether I agree with this.
|
| Don't we expect children to learn basic mathematics
| without access to a calculator? This despite the fact
| that there are certainly children who struggle with
| laborious long multiplication and division. Our eldest
| was one of them!
| icepat wrote:
| I think there's a major difference between using
| something that removes the need for basic knowledge, as
| opposed to allows that knowledge to be learned in a
| different way. I'm not advocating _not teaching people to
| write_ , I'm suggesting we do that, but then provide them
| the option to use a computer to assist their learning.
|
| If you provide someone with a calculator, there's no need
| for them to learn how to do basic math. If you provide
| someone who can write with a computer, you're just
| altering how the information is retained, not what
| information is retained.
| logifail wrote:
| > I think there's a major difference between using
| something that removes the need for basic knowledge, as
| opposed to allows that knowledge to be learned in a
| different way.
|
| > I'm not advocating not teaching people to write, I'm
| suggesting we do that, but then provide them the option
| to use a computer to assist their learning
|
| Q1a: What would we say is the purpose of young people
| learning to write unaided, with just pencil and paper?
|
| Q1b: At what point do we say "OK, that's enough basic
| knowledge", and we let them reach for an electronic
| device to assist?
|
| and
|
| Q2a: What would we say is the purpose of learning to do
| mathematics unaided, with just pencil and paper?
|
| Q2b: At what point do we say "OK, that's enough basic
| knowledge", and we let them reach for an electronic
| device to assist?
|
| I'm not sure that I see that there's much difference
| between the two.
|
| In both cases, there _will_ come a time when you don 't
| have your device (or its charger) handy, and you _will_
| have a significant advantage if you can manage the task
| in front of you without electronic assistance.
| icepat wrote:
| Again, not advocating teaching people with the machines
| that abstract, just letting them use the machines to help
| them collect their knowledge and solidify it. My point is
| very clear, and there's no real ambiguity in what I'm
| getting at. You're constructing a slippery slope argument
| here and asking "well if we let them take notes on
| laptops, then what? Stop teaching them to add"?
| Symbiote wrote:
| I draw your attention to where I wrote the laptop would
| be on prescription from an expert, with guidance to
| teachers. That puts it outside any blanket ban that might
| otherwise exist.
|
| Some process is inevitable when your needs are far
| outside the norm and have the potential to disrupt the
| education of the rest of the class.
|
| (I can't comment on the situation in Canada.)
| icepat wrote:
| And I did note that, and address it. This is exactly like
| the line of reasoning that blocked my access to the tools
| I needed to learn. Like I said, the bureaucratic process
| of getting an assessment is often prohibitive. Many
| educational experts are stuck in specific ways, and
| unwilling to suggest accommodations unless there's
| obvious _disability_. Radically different learning styles
| are not considered a disability, but rather a problem the
| student must rectify on their own. Now that I 'm out of
| school, I'm completely functional at work, and in other
| domains of life.
|
| I see it as similar to being left-handed in the 1800's.
| Eventually we're going to see that the approach we're
| taking now is just as nonsensical. We're essentially
| beating the devil out of children now by forcing them to
| adopt a learning approach that was developed _over a
| hundred years ago_ when there was no other way.
|
| I think you're error here is in assuming that you will be
| given what you need if you simply ask for it in school. I
| assure you, this is not the case. In many cases, I've had
| teachers (and later profs) explicitly go out of their way
| to exempt themselves from having to provide any
| accommodations at all. Even when supplying them was
| _legally mandated_ by provincial government. One sticks
| out in my memory as having quite literally saying "then
| sue me" when I was refused an accommodation specifically
| required in my student file.
| logifail wrote:
| > You would like to assume that teachers and school
| administrators are looking for the best way to educate
| people, but sadly that's not always the case
|
| At the latest since become a parent and having school-age
| kids it's become patently clear to me that this isn't
| what school administrators or the indeed the vast
| majority of teachers are looking for at all.
| logifail wrote:
| > I had a specific teacher who'd assume I was not paying
| attention, and ask me to answer often. Much to his
| surprise, I was fully engaged and able to respond
|
| In school I spent many (un)happy hours gazing out of the
| windows of the class due to sheer boredom.
|
| Q: Are you able to comment on how the pace of learning is
| for you? Too slow / just right / too fast?
|
| Once I got to University my learning style quickly
| evolved into "take notes on everything the lecturer
| said", with pen and paper. Hard to tune out of a lecture
| when you are literally writing _everything_ down, at
| speed.
|
| For me at least it was definitely a most effective way of
| learning (and then revising). Writing stuff out, over and
| over and over again.
| blitzar wrote:
| > Hard to tune out of a lecture when you are literally
| writing everything down, at speed.
|
| Hard to actually consume the contents of a lecture when
| you are frantically trying to reproduce a powerpoint
| slide and transcript of what someone is saying in real
| time.
| logifail wrote:
| > Hard to actually consume the contents of a lecture when
| you are frantically trying to reproduce a powerpoint
| slide and transcript of what someone is saying in real
| time
|
| I would postulate that for the majority of people, in the
| majority of learning situations, writing out notes could
| (should?) be an integral part of consuming the contents
| of a lecture.
|
| There's a 2021 paper from the University of Tokyo
| entitled "Paper Notebooks vs. Mobile Devices: Brain
| Activation Differences During Memory Retrieval"[0] which
| is worth reading.
|
| NB: this obviously won't (can't) work for everyone.
|
| [0] https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2021.634158
| icepat wrote:
| I think an important addendum here is that the
| environment of a lab, and the environment of an
| uncontrolled classroom are different. So it's entirely
| possible that the actual real-world effects might be even
| more different than what we see here. While I agree that
| the effect of writing is well documented, I still find
| that the external factors around the act of writing get
| in the way of properly tapping into that added benefit.
| icepat wrote:
| > Hard to tune out of a lecture when you are literally
| writing everything down, at speed.
|
| The issue here is what I mentioned above: illegible
| handwriting. The more pressure I am under, the higher my
| stress levels, the harder is becomes to take clear notes.
| In these situations I would end up with incomplete,
| illegible, useless, scrawl on pages.
|
| > Are you able to comment on how the pace of learning is
| for you? Too slow / just right / too fast?
|
| All over the map, really. The lack of consistent tempo in
| most lectures was the issue. If the class was too slow:
| zoning out, forgetting to take down critical parts. If
| the class was too quick: overwhelmed, unable to take
| clear usable notes. The duration of a class was always
| too long as well, but that's not just a me issue.
| Empirically, there's a infinite amount of time that
| someone can stay actively engaged. I don't recall exactly
| how long, but I do remember all university lectures
| lasted very generously longer than that.
|
| My highest scores in class were always courses where
| there was an excellent textbook (or where I had found a
| supplemental textbook), or where I could effectively
| teach myself the material. IE: philosophy courses where,
| instead of attending, I could just read the selected
| writer's works. One of my highest marks was in a class I
| never once attended.
| folkrav wrote:
| > What were the benefits of being in class if you're
| basically doing something else and not actively listening?
|
| I can only speak for myself, but back in school, I've
| always found actively listening in to class to be extremely
| laborious. There was seemingly just no way for me to focus
| on someone talking without additional stimulation for more
| than 20-30 minutes at a time. I typically just read the
| teacher's slides or was done grasping the base concept
| faster than the rest of the class, then lost focus the
| second things started to get repeated or re-explained for
| other students. Bringing in a laptop helped me stay focused
| as I could Google stuff the teacher/speaker talked about,
| tag my notes, insert links as relevant, etc. Basically, it
| let me go at my own pace rather than forcing the class'
| pace on me. I could use the time to do further research on
| the subject as I was taking my notes instead of relying on
| me going back to them (which realistically never happened).
|
| In the end, it turned out to be undiagnosed ADHD/PI, for
| which I've now been getting treated for the last 6 months
| (which helps tremendously!). Not pretending like it would
| be beneficial for all kids, but there's a case to be made
| that not everyone learns in the same way.
| scrollaway wrote:
| I'm not the person you responded to, but when I was in
| school, if a class didn't captivate me, it wasn't going to
| be any better if I "paid more attention". It was either I'm
| listening and actively learning, or I'm bored.
|
| We didn't have laptops back then. Now when I do learn, with
| the benefit of experience and technology, it's a mix of
| videos + active research / googling. And I often enough
| just leave educational videos running in the background
| while doing something a little more mindless if I'm not in
| the mood to fully pay attention.
|
| People learn differently. I want to stress this: There
| really are different types of learners, and applying one
| method to everybody means some people lose out. That said
| (and this is completely anecdotal), the smartest hands-on
| "easily distracted" learners I know run massive circles all
| the meticulous book learners I know.
| icepat wrote:
| > There really are different types of learners, and
| applying one method to everybody means some people lose
| out.
|
| You get it -- this is exactly what I'm getting at. The
| second issue here is that many people grow up thinking
| they're bad at a lot of things, when in reality they just
| were bad at learning it in the prescribed way.
|
| My favorite example is the _one_ computer science course
| I took, I failed. And I failed it _hard_. This was a
| course in a programming language I 'd been actively using
| for a year, as a contractor, working in data engineering.
| Needless to say, I was baffled.
| folkrav wrote:
| > many people grow up thinking they're bad at a lot of
| things, when in reality they just were bad at learning it
| in the prescribed way.
|
| I spent half my life convinced that I was bad at
| mathematics. My math grades in high school dropped
| sharply the second we hit algebra, and they never really
| recovered. When I decided to reorient my studies towards
| programming approaching my mid 20s, this led to me
| missing some HS prerequisites. Long story short, we have
| 3 levels of math classes in the last two grades of high
| school here, I passed the mid-level of 4th grade, needed
| mid-level of 5th grade at least. So I enrolled in remote
| HS for this one class.
|
| All it took was me sitting down with the teacher once and
| grilling him with all my questions for everything I
| misunderstood as a teen to finally click. Working on
| exercises on my own terms, and actually having the
| opportunity to understand _why_ things work the way they
| do rather than just learning obscure formulas and
| applying them, let me realize "well shit, this stuff's
| actually easy". I aced the class, got my prerequisite,
| and got in my CS program. The rest is history, I've now
| been working for almost 7 years, stepped up from junior
| to leading my own team.
|
| I'd wager I'm far from alone in this situation. The one-
| size-fits-all approach to education is IMHO doing more
| harm than good.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Not everyone benefits, the computer is just a huge source of
| distractions and it can really set people back.
| icepat wrote:
| That's why I'm not saying to it for everyone. Reverse that
| logic, and apply it to the regular teaching style. It cuts
| both ways.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| exabrial wrote:
| I was lucky enough to go to a school with uniforms. I thought
| it was stupid at the time. As an adult, I realize now what that
| did was level the playing field between the rich kids and poor
| kids.
|
| I can't even imagine being a kid in school these days with an
| off brand smartphone or ipods, especially when Apple actively
| promotes bullying non users.
| rlmineing_dead wrote:
| Android user in sophomore year here, no one really cares
| [deleted]
| danpalmer wrote:
| Why?
|
| I used a laptop full time in school from 16-18 (and then at
| university too) and found it much more productive. My notes
| were better and more usable.
|
| For younger children I think everyone agrees that it's
| important to be teaching computer skills, and that requires
| computers. Having rooms of desktop computers is arguably
| outdated, and a poor use of space, so many schools have
| switched to trolleys of shared laptops.
|
| Additionally there's a problem with computer access for
| homework. Many households don't have a computer suitable for
| homework, so by giving every child a laptop, schools can
| (theoretically) rely on everyone having a basic level of
| equipment available.
|
| Is this perfect? No, it takes some effort to do, but given
| modern remote management tools I'd expect not a lot more than
| traditional IT provisioning at schools. Should kids get one
| from day 1 in kindergarten? Probably not, but during primary
| school could be reasonable.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Developmentally, a 16-18 year old is very different than a
| child.
|
| I don't know whether laptops in school are bad for children,
| but you can't really make that comparison.
|
| Personally, my belief is that children should learn to use
| computers (I did as a child, and it was massively beneficial)
| but that computers should not be central to their
| foundational education.
|
| Kids shouldn't learn basic arithmetic on a computer. They
| should learn it with their hands, with things they can hold,
| and by writing.
|
| Computers can come later when the math is far more advanced.
| derefr wrote:
| One thought: if the computer is locked down into a mode
| where it's acting as a fancy typewriter to fill form-fields
| (i.e. if you're kiosked into the Blackboard worksheet "app"
| during the lesson), then what's the difference between
| learning by typing vs. "by writing"?
|
| Another thought: "learning with their hands, with things
| they can hold" is nice to say, but counting blocks/geometry
| boards/etc are actually rather expensive (hard to have as
| many sets as there are kids, for several reasons), so often
| kids will only get a short amount of time to experience
| such things, rather than being able to use them as a
| thinking aid whenever they want until they grow out of the
| need for them. On the other hand, presuming each child has
| a computer, "learning by interactive example" -- i.e.
| having interactive touch-enabled simulations of these same
| learning toys -- is almost as good, and freely scalable to
| the entire student population, such that each child gets as
| much time to experiment with the simulation -- and really
| _learn_ the lesson of it -- as they want. Including taking
| it home with them!
|
| A third thought, perhaps less persuasive because I'm an
| outlier, but personally meaningful to me: back in the 90s,
| I learned PEDMAS before parentheses were even taught to us
| in school. I had grabbed "C for Dummies" from a grocery-
| store shelf -- asking my mum to purchase it for me --
| because I knew that C was how you made video games.
| Instead, I ended up reading about "operator precedence" /
| "operator binding affinity" as a general concept. Yes, I
| was 9; yes, most of what I read flew right over my head.
| But that part stuck! And when I later -- at the age of 11
| -- learned PHP and then Ruby, I already understood how to
| translate math on a page into syntax for a REPL, because I
| had seen the C example of how to write binding-precedence
| _parsing_. And then I _did_ start creating (simple) game
| demos -- and more interestingly, from-scratch game
| _engines_ to power them (because toolkits like Unity weren
| 't a thing back then), which involved more than a little
| bit of maths to make even the simplest physics integration
| steps work. (Yes, this means I understood how acceleration
| translates to velocity and then displacement -- and so had
| an intuitive grasp of integrals, despite never having been
| exposed to them -- when I was 12. I came into my pre-calc
| and physics classes prepared!)
| nkrisc wrote:
| > One thought: if the computer is locked down into a mode
| where it's acting as a fancy typewriter to fill form-
| fields (i.e. if you're kiosked into the Blackboard
| worksheet "app" during the lesson), then what's the
| difference between learning by typing vs. "by writing"?
|
| There is some evidence to suggest that writing does help
| retain information, as multiple functions of the brain
| are being engaged with the same information. Whether that
| extends to typing and using a computer I do not know.
|
| > Another thought: "learning with their hands, with
| things they can hold" is nice to say, but counting
| blocks/geometry boards/etc are actually rather expensive
| (hard to have as many sets as there are kids, for several
| reasons), so often kids will only get a short amount of
| time to experience such things, rather than being able to
| use them as a thinking aid whenever they want until they
| grow out of the need for them.
|
| That's a failure of the education system, not an argument
| in favor of computers in the classroom. That problem is
| solvable without computers.
|
| Lastly, kids learning how to use computers _is_ a good
| thing, I do believe. I do not, however, believe that
| learning on computers should _replace_ other forms of
| learning, especially for foundational skills.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > One thought: if the computer is locked down into a mode
| where it's acting as a fancy typewriter to fill form-
| fields (i.e. if you're kiosked into the Blackboard
| worksheet "app" during the lesson), then what's the
| difference between learning by typing vs. "by writing"?
|
| There's a good amount of evidence for a difference.
| Example study (of which there are many): https://www.scie
| ncedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210319080820.h...
|
| "A study of university students and recent graduates has
| revealed that writing on physical paper can lead to more
| brain activity when remembering the information an hour
| later. Researchers say that the unique, complex, spatial
| and tactile information associated with writing by hand
| on physical paper is likely what leads to improved
| memory."
| exedore6 wrote:
| You say that as if learning maths by hand/on paper is
| generally effective. Tell me that your peers aren't
| innumerate.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Most people have the world's knowledge in their pocket,
| including a calculator, and still can't tell you the
| original price of a $25.00 item that's 15% off. You're
| describing a general education problem.
|
| I'm not saying you can't teach kids math on a computer,
| I'm saying I believe it's better not to.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I agree that developmentally children are different at that
| age, which is why I suggested different reasons why it may
| still be appropriate.
|
| I think basic computer access at home and for homework is a
| pretty convincing reason. And I do agree that kids should
| learn to write with a pen and do maths without a calculator
| (/computer).
| madoublet wrote:
| I don't think everyone agrees.
| joxel wrote:
| The answer is to obviously use both. Anyone advocating for
| paper only or computer only are dumb ideologues at best.
| fruit2020 wrote:
| My daughter is 8 and already has a chromebook at school. I
| freaked out when she started to search stuff on Google at
| home on the ipad. Need to look into parental controls.
| madoublet wrote:
| Learned that the hard way with my kids. Google Family
| Link is awesome. Apple Screen Time is adequate.
| danaris wrote:
| So, what, you think that children should have to figure out
| computers for themselves? That only the geeky ones (who are
| likely to poke at stuff and learn that way) should actually
| have a clue how to use computers?
|
| Or is it that you think parents should be teaching this--
| which guarantees it's only going to be taught to the
| children of the reasonably well-off?
|
| Welcome to the 21st century, where it's widely beneficial
| for _everyone_ to know how to use computers at least at a
| basic level, and skills like "how to use simple Excel
| formulas" are often enough _on their own_ to get people
| decent-paying office jobs. _Because_ the people already
| working there were never taught how to use computers in any
| systematic way beyond, maybe, "keyboarding classes".
|
| Where many governments _require_ forms of various types to
| be submitted online, and only put out many kinds of
| information on their websites.
|
| Where it's nearly a guarantee that people are going to be
| using social media, no matter how much you try to restrict
| them, so it's a _damn_ good idea to teach them how to
| recognize misinformation and other kinds of manipulation
| (not _strictly_ a computer skill, but definitely related).
| madoublet wrote:
| I certainly wouldn't argue with how anyone else raises
| their children, but I think it has been hugely beneficial
| to restrict access to technology early in my kids' lives.
| It can be introduced as they get older without worrying
| about them falling behind
| troupe wrote:
| I don't know. The family I've seen that don't give their
| kids unrestricted access to the internet have no problem
| keeping them off of social media.
| danaris wrote:
| I want to be _very_ clear here:
|
| I'm not talking about kids. I'm saying those kids _will
| grow up_ , and once they grow up, they will _almost
| certainly_ be on social media.
|
| If they are not taught about critical thinking, media
| literacy, and how to recognize manipulations and
| misinformation _while they are still in school_ , they
| will be easy prey for all the various kinds of sharks out
| there.
| joxel wrote:
| That they know of. I did a lot of things my parents
| didn't approve of or know of.
| cientifico wrote:
| Most people that disagree (at least the ones that I talked
| with) assume that the computer will REPLACE traditional
| teaching: Books, drawing, pencil, paper.
|
| Nevertheless promoters don't generally want to get rid of
| traditional teaching tools. Just add digital tools as part
| of the learning experience.
|
| And contrary to most popular believe, kids don't want to be
| all the time with the computers.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I have been using computers since I'm 7-8, and I used it to
| play games, take notes, study, etc.
|
| Yes, teaching computer skills is important, but crippling
| their writing and adding a tool into the classroom which can
| steal their focus faster than anything else is not a
| productive way to do it.
|
| Have classes which needs computers, and classes which ban
| them during class hours. Being able to focus on a piece of
| paper with a pen or pencil is equally important.
|
| Writing improves cognitive skills, thinking, retention, and
| more. I still design software on paper prior to implementing
| it, and I can see the whole thing much clearer and better.
|
| Every person should have computer skills and access to a
| computer, yes, but they should be able to work without them,
| too.
|
| Otherwise, we'll also realize The Foundation series from
| Asimov. We'll lose the essence which allows us to create and
| understand these things in the first place.
| baremetal wrote:
| >I still design software on paper prior to implementing it,
| and I can see the whole thing much clearer and better.
|
| I do the same thing.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I agree with you _if_ science agrees.
|
| It's easy enough to give some classes chromebooks, while others
| don't have chromebooks, and see who gets higher test scores.
|
| Then keep track of those people, and see who does better at
| university, and who ends up earning more, having a bigger
| house, or living longer - just to confirm that those people
| really end up doing better, rather than just doing well on the
| test.
| blackhaz wrote:
| Getting Chromebooks to schools is the single most horrific act
| we could have done to our education system. This act undermines
| the very future of our nations. A big proportion of all the
| classwork and homework is now done on the screen. There is
| plenty of evidence that handwriting boosts cognitive processes
| - thinking on paper is something that the next generation will
| mostly lack. Rich and powerful are all aware of that, so they
| deliberately put their own kids into private schools where
| screen exposure is more limited.
|
| Not only that. We are promoting to our kids a fully proprietary
| system that increasingly becomes a walled garden, run by an
| aggressive imperialist company with abysmal technical support,
| with a complete failure in parental control practices. It is,
| at least with our school, completely impossible to implement
| parental controls on enrolled Chromebooks, so you have to trust
| the school's policy which is, in many cases, inadequate. The
| school's solution - well, take the Chromebook away at home.
| Good luck with that.
|
| Chromebook pushes the agenda of Google cloud and Google apps on
| the user. Millions of people are grown into this world assuming
| the only option for them to perform functions or access their
| own data is to be online and use the cloud. This is as close to
| a digital dystopia as I can imagine.
|
| I don't like what Google has become and I would never buy a
| Google Chromebook. Forcing this in schools so early (11-years
| old here in the UK) is a crime we're all committing. We all are
| going to pay for it.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I am dyslexic, so I was allowed to use a laptop for class and
| exams while others had to handwrite on paper. It gave me an
| enormous advantage in both. I would do better than kids who
| were objectively better at the subject, simply because I
| could type so much faster and more accurately than they could
| write. Also typing requires way less focus, so you can devote
| your attention to the actual task.
|
| I don't see why you would want to sabotage the next
| generation by denying them access to the tools which would be
| available to them in the workplace.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| It mostly prepares young people for another walled garden
| later on, the Mac ecosystem.
| px43 wrote:
| First off, Google is in no way a walled garden. Every
| Google product makes their data easily exportable to a
| variety of open source and commercial alternatives. Second,
| how does the Google system _primarily_ prepare people for
| the Apple ecosystem? That makes zero sense.
|
| When I grew up in the 90s, every school was dominated by
| Apple computers, and Apple's walled garden made it so if
| you didn't have an Apple computer at home to work on
| homework, you were basically fucked if you wanted to work
| on or print anything at school. Switching to Chromebooks is
| exactly what let kids escape from walled gardens, so then
| they could work on homework using any computer with a web
| browser.
| moron4hire wrote:
| 11 years old? Lucky you. My kid got the thing foisted on him
| at FIVE.
|
| And even if all of those issues could be resolved, like
| somehow making a Linux tablet with handwriting recognition
| and only open-source software (or whatever, I don't actually
| think it would be anywhere close to sufficient)...
|
| The educational software is just garbage. Math and reading
| games that allow way too much guessing. "Science" games that
| basically amount to a skinned version of Super Mario Bros,
| literally still just collecting coins, so you can then buy
| pictures of animals in the game. But it's got that Wild Kratz
| licensing! Don't forget to purchase the books!
|
| And it's the same thing, over and over again.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| [dead]
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think you'll need to apply Hanlon's razor to your
| conjecture. Plenty of misinformed "good will" to go around
| that no malice is required to explain it.
| gillesjacobs wrote:
| A problem with handwriting Vs pc-note taking studies is that
| obviously computer-based teaching has not been fully adopted
| and integrated.
|
| Maybe the problem is not the computer but the broader
| cultural and technological maturity. I bet with teaching
| methods directed at information technology (multimodal,
| interactive text books) and proper learning and attention
| management skills on the student's end, we could see an
| increase in learning capacity.
|
| Agree 100% on the detriment of using proprietary, closed
| source software. As an educator you have a responsibility to
| not vendor-lock your students and strengthen monopolies.
| Proprietary software should be outlawed when FOSS
| alternatives are available. You should be teaching skills and
| concepts not specific tools anyway.
| fatnoah wrote:
| > A big proportion of all the classwork and homework is now
| done on the screen. There is plenty of evidence that
| handwriting boosts cognitive processes - thinking on paper is
| something that the next generation will mostly lack.
|
| It's a dual-edged sword, IMHO. I fully agree that writing by
| hand feels very different both in terms of the ability to
| take notes while paying attention to someone else AND seems
| to promote better thought and recall.
|
| Devices can have a benefit, though. My 15 year old w/ADHD has
| constantly struggled with note taking and test preparation.
| What he's recently found that works well is to create online
| quizzes based on study materials. It keeps him engaged since
| it's more active, plus the act of creating the quizzes
| themselves runs the information through his brain.
|
| All that said, I agree on the dangers of the walled garden
| and that technical, privacy, or other issues will certainly
| lead to cases where the technology becomes a distraction,
| even when used as intended.
| npteljes wrote:
| >Not only that. We are promoting to our kids a fully
| proprietary system that increasingly becomes a walled garden,
| run by an aggressive imperialist company with abysmal
| technical support, with a complete failure in parental
| control practices.
|
| Yeah, we really exchanged one for the other. Previously it
| was all Microsoft Windows and Office, as a lonely IT
| enthusiast in a smaller city, I haven't even known about
| Linux or any other alternatives right until university. I
| wish free software was the standard, in education and
| government alike.
| [deleted]
| stuaxo wrote:
| My 4 year old came back with a Windows laptop during Covid,
| but over the last year they have stopped using them, they
| only use the desktops they have in ICT.
| jay-barronville wrote:
| Thank you for this discussion. I'm generally in agreement
| with your sentiment.
|
| This is something my wife and I have been discussing. We're
| planning on homeschooling our children, which means we'll get
| to dictate how much screen exposure they'll get.
|
| I'm convinced that these devices are only making us dumber --
| sure, on one hand, we (most folks in society today) can be
| more efficient, but on the other hand, we struggle with
| retaining even some of the most basic information due to our
| strong dependence on technology.
|
| As a computer nerd, my home is obviously filled with
| computers and related devices, but I don't want my children
| growing up in an environment where everyone around them is
| dependent on technology to survive.
| 31337Logic wrote:
| Thank you for this.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > It is, at least with our school, completely impossible to
| implement parental controls on enrolled Chromebooks, so you
| have to trust the school's policy which is, in many cases,
| inadequate.
|
| Parental control is bullcrap anyway - and at least for
| parents of my age, _complete_ hypocrisy to boot. We turned
| out generally fine _despite_ having active trade networks at
| school for everything... warez, games, movies no matter their
| rating, copious amounts of porn, shocker sites, whatnot. I
| remember the debates about how shooter games would turn us
| all into killers after Columbine (in the US) and Erfurt
| (2002) /Emsdetten (2006)/Winnenden (2009) in Germany, and
| yet... at least German kids grew up perfectly normal, and
| amok incidents remain a rarity [1] in Germany.
|
| The only ones pushing for "parental control" are religious
| fundamentalist parents not realizing just how backwards they
| are. And for the Americans: ffs instead of blaming shooter
| games for mass shootings, maybe invest into mental health
| services, bullying prevention and actual gun control. Your
| society has a massive problem with violence, but shooter
| games are not a part of it at all.
|
| [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Amokl%C3%A4ufen_a
| n_B...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > We turned out generally fine despite having active trade
| networks at school for everything... warez, games, movies
| no matter their rating, copious amounts of porn, shocker
| sites, whatnot.
|
| Since then, though, multi-hundred-billion dollar
| corporations have arisen that employ vast quantities of
| employees (including psychologists) tasked with obtaining
| and keeping your attention on their content and the
| surrounding advertising empires.
|
| It's not quite the same setup we had to deal with.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yeah but "parental control" crap doesn't deal with any of
| that. It's all about preventing porn and LGBT content.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Modern "parental control" is highly customizable. We use
| it in our household to limit things like Reddit during
| homework time, set per-game limits so no one's sitting on
| Bejeweled for eight hours, etc. Not one of our
| restrictions covers LBGTQ+ content.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Time spent on screens is strongly correlated with worse
| mental health.
|
| So limiting access is investing in mental health.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Citation:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6214874/
|
| > After 1 h/day of use, more hours of daily screen time
| were associated with lower psychological well-being,
| including less curiosity, lower self-control, more
| distractibility, more difficulty making friends, less
| emotional stability, being more difficult to care for,
| and inability to finish tasks.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| I think between school shootings and failing to do anything
| about Covid there's worse things happening to kids.
| Retric wrote:
| School should be preparing people for the "real world" after
| graduation.
|
| Learning to think on the computer is a useful skill and 6th
| graders US (11 year olds are year 7 in UK) have had half a
| decade of paper instruction. So making the jump at 11 is
| perfectly reasonable.
|
| Chromebook is simply cheap to buy and manage. The point of
| these is a simple tool, little different than a calculator.
| If Google offends you feel free to sell Linux laptops, just
| understand schools don't want to spend anything managing
| computers.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I believe the point is that if Google gave a @&#$ about not
| being evil, they could have sandboxed a shell, included
| basic unix tools and a compiler, and made this non-
| disableable.
|
| Instead, they catered to the same jackasses who
| featurespec'd SharePoint. Missed opportunity.
| jamespo wrote:
| https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=e
| n-G...
| ethbr0 wrote:
| >> _Important: If you use your Chromebook at work or
| school, you might not be able to use Linux. For more
| information, contact your administrator._
|
| >> _{enable developer mode}_
|
| If it were sandboxed, that's shouldn't be something it's
| possible for managed administrators to disable.
| XionXIV wrote:
| It definitely is sandboxed. I think the concern is that
| kids will get off task with it by installing games and
| stuff.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| IMHO, a _limited_ (read: CLI) but general-purpose
| computing environment is exactly what we should be
| providing our kids.
|
| No one would play TI-83 games if they had other
| options... but it'd be hard to say writing and modifying
| them wasn't educational.
| blackhaz wrote:
| I think we all had no problem growing up being ready for
| IT, and my parents can do taxes online. _Forcing_ kids to
| do everything online in school and at home is what 's
| fundamentally new and wrong here. There is no option of
| paper. Of course, unless by "real world" we mean an army of
| zombies training somebody's else AI and consuming
| reprocessed digital matter...
|
| I wish Chromebook was only a calculator at school, but kids
| do research, write essays, projects, solve puzzles - pretty
| much the whole homework process is now moving online.
| Instead of really thinking and planning, you're clicking
| buttons, writing WYSIWYG and drag'n'dropping things around.
| That's not how we've learnt, and research says there is
| evidence that inhibits cognitive development. Folks really
| on top in SV are perfectly aware of that, of course.
|
| What's horrific, also, is that all this is heavily
| subsidized by vendors like Google. They know they're
| investing into raising a user base, so open solutions have
| no chance of competing, not to mention being ready for the
| task.
|
| This is radically different from microcomputers, the Apple
| IIs, ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64s that boosted our
| generation.
| michaelmior wrote:
| > Instead of really thinking and planning, you're
| clicking buttons, writing WYSIWYG and drag'n'dropping
| things around.
|
| This suggest that _really_ thinking and planning can 't
| happen while doing these things. I understand the
| concern, but I'm not entirely convinced that's true.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| It might lead to a good thing, internet access as a
| right. I hope this becomes the norm at some point, much
| like the right to have a bank account in the EU.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >>Forcing kids to do everything online in school and at
| home is what's fundamentally new and wrong here. There is
| no option of paper.
|
| Once upon a time they said the same thing about paper.
| There was a time when kids wrote on sand or clay because
| paper was far to expensive. When ballpoints came along
| someone probably stood up and said that it was wrong for
| kids to use them as cutting and maintaining quills was an
| essential skill, that the easy use of ballpoints meant
| that children would not be so careful about their
| writing. (When I was in grade school, our desks had holes
| for ink wells.) Then came calculators and teachers moaned
| about how kids would loose the necessary skill that was
| long division. Then electronic encyclopedias, and _one of
| my teachers_ complained about how Encarta made it too
| easy to skip between articles, as opposed to walking
| around the library. And it the back of every arts collage
| sits an aging film professor bemoaning how digital
| editing has disrupted the "tried and true" skill of
| splicing film reals together onto platters.
| px43 wrote:
| Apple's stranglehold over the public school system where
| I'm at, in the 90s up until 2010 or so, was an absolute
| atrocity. Chromebooks are infinitely better.
| Retric wrote:
| For most Americans English is their native language and
| yet after 12 years of English classes most collages still
| have English classes. Spending that long teaching English
| is worthwhile because basic literacy isn't enough.
|
| The same is true for computers. Most people may stumble
| through doing their taxes, can watch YouTube, and figure
| out email but they aren't fluent. If I asked you what the
| current light speed delay between earth and Saturn is
| right now you could probably find out it's somewhere
| between 87.66 and 71.02 minutes in a few seconds. But,
| finding it was 1 hours, 29 minutes and 36.6430 seconds
| from earth as I write this involved more effort and
| having some idea where to look.
|
| You might not think of that as computer literacy, but
| people need to know how to do more than just the GUI on a
| WYSIWTG editor to actually write a good essay.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Handwritten note taking is just better for retaining
| information. Why would you move to something inferior in
| sixth grade?
| psychphysic wrote:
| Doing calculations on paper is better for arithmetics.
| But a calculator is better than humans at that and at
| some point you need to move on from long division and box
| multiplication.
|
| Same here.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Sure, we have machines to do arithmetic for us. It
| doesn't matter if the machine takes that over. But
| handwritten notes are better for learning. I'd like to
| keep learning.
| moron4hire wrote:
| I think this vastly overestimates the difficulty in
| learning how to use a computer. How is it that entire
| generations of people were able to get through school with
| no computer classes whatsoever and still able to invent
| computers, the internet, the very software you're using to
| talk with us right now? Decades of research in interface
| design have gone into making computers easy to use, user
| friendly, and accessible.
|
| Carpentry is a skill that needs to be trained. Using the
| tools safely and optimally isn't something that most raw
| beginners will be able to figure out on their own.
|
| But computers: barring issues of socioeconomic status
| preventing access to them, the kids will do alright on
| their own.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I think the valuable part would be the soft skills of
| thinking and working while having 12 things blinking and
| beeping for attention a keystroke away. This is how I
| have to work -- need to be available on Slack, watch out
| for urgent email, keep an eye on some dashboard for a
| service that is acting strange but not in a way that
| anyone is calling an incident yet, watch for Outlook
| reminders of meetings coming up). You're right that
| pencil and notebook is probably a better way to /retain
| information/ but that might need to be a separate kind of
| lesson from one about /existing in a 21st century
| information environment/.
| Retric wrote:
| Learning how to use a computer is like learning how to
| use a pen. It's not binary there is a huge difference
| between knowing how to say surf the web and actually know
| how to use it for research.
|
| Carpentry a great analogy as you can learn the basic
| skills to build a perfectly functional house in a few
| weeks. However, you can literally spend a lifetime
| mastering it. So, let's not pretend the bare minimum of
| computer literacy is all there is to know.
|
| Anti Vax people for example have fundamental issues with
| knowing how to utilize computer technology. They where
| ill prepared to separate fact from FUD and it's causing
| real problems. Having 11 year olds writing papers that
| get graded is a great way to transition kids from basic
| literacy into mastery.
| bombolo wrote:
| And in school they don't teach how to use them
| effectively... or they wouldn't be using locked down
| google stuff.
| Retric wrote:
| Learning is a multi stage process. The military doesn't
| start 17 year old kids on F-35 fighter jets. It's the
| same deal here, the vastly lower cost option is good
| enough to be useful training.
|
| Chromebooks are the baking soda equivalent in middle
| school school chemistry experiments. Cheap and
| instructive is considered good enough.
| asah wrote:
| LoL watching over-50s using computers is pretty
| painful...
| furyg3 wrote:
| The 'real world' is more than just sitting at a desk and
| working with computers...
|
| and for a lot of us geeks let's be super clear: it's a
| happy accident that all that time networking, overclocking,
| and modding our computers to play quake (or whatever) paid
| off. A lot of the most 'prepared for the real world' hacker
| news crowd could have benefitted from greater offline /
| social / artistic endeavors, including myself.
|
| That isn't to say kids shouldn't have access to computers
| in school, only that prepping a kid for an information
| economy is not, can not, and should not be the only purpose
| of education.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Rich and powerful are all aware of that, so they
| deliberately put their own kids into private schools where
| screen exposure is more limited._
|
| I bet both of these go the other way:
|
| * While some rich and powerful people are anti-screen, I
| expect it's more common for them to want their kids using
| computers in school so they're better prepared.
|
| * Private schools are more likely to have laptops and other
| tech, because they can afford it. While you get the
| occasional story about a fancy school that is trying to
| minimize tech, "poor school has no laptops because they're
| too expensive" doesn't make the news.
| xenophonf wrote:
| Where I went to college, certain math and science classes were
| taught on NeXT workstations. I'll admit that staying focused on
| class was a challenge for my 17-year-old self, but having in-
| class access to tools like Mathematica and being able to
| manipulate equations and simulations with the teacher really
| made understanding how the math/physics worked so much easier.
|
| I started taking meeting notes on a succession of Palm and then
| Compaq handhelds before I bought my first Tablet PC with
| OneNote in 2005. It was a tremendously valuable tool both
| professionally and academically. For example, this is a page of
| notes from a Tandberg certification class I took in 2006:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/1XgNOoi
|
| Sharing my notes was trivial. I could print to PDF and email to
| the rest of my team in a minute. Organizing my notes was
| equally simple. It's been nearly two decades, and I was able to
| locate these notes in seconds. Even though they're handwritten,
| OneNote can index my notes. It's pretty amazing.
|
| Around the same time, I took an ITIL certification class. The
| teacher was someone like you, and he demanded we put away our
| computers for class. I'd love to share with you the detailed
| notes I took, but they're buried somewhere in a drawer full of
| paper notebooks. It'd probably take me an hour or two to locate
| those notes, scan them, and upload them somewhere. My employer
| spent thousands on that class, but if I have ITIL questions in
| my various IT operations roles, I have to google reference
| material instead of using what I created for myself. It's such
| a ridiculous waste of time and effort that it still frustrates
| me, ~15 years later.
| logifail wrote:
| > I don't think kids should have chrome books, or any type of
| laptops in school
|
| Our eldest has had a school-issue iPad, along with the rest of
| his class, for a couple of years now.
|
| As a parent I'd suggest that, despite being basically issued
| "for free", they're a very mixed blessing, since they were
| given out I can count on one hand the number of pieces of work
| his class have done on the iPad where the device was of
| benefit.
|
| The number of times my son has reported one of his classmates
| getting into trouble due to messing about on iPad in class
| easily numbers in the hundreds...
|
| If the school decided to take all the iPads away tomorrow I
| wouldn't be bothered in the slightest.
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| I concur. Nothing I learnt in high school required anything
| more than pen and paper.But my EE degree? I would lie if I said
| a laptop with Matlab did not help me immensely to learn
| concepts
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| And my math classes didn't require a calculator. Still
| would've been a disservice to ban them, because the point is
| to prepare you for real life where using a computer is the
| expectation.
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| Learning to do high school maths by hand and then doing it
| on a computer is trivial. Learning everything through a
| computer and then trying to do it by hand is incredibly
| hard.
|
| Having your basic education be dependent on the most
| complicated tech in existence seems a bit too much for me.
| I don't think 5nm chips made in Taiwan are the best way to
| teach a kid what division is and who Napoleon was.
| watwut wrote:
| Your first introduction to computers was at college level?
| Cause in my university, if you did not came with preexisting
| knowledge of computers, you had zero chance studying CS or
| anything programming related.
|
| The expectation was that you already know a lot about
| computer usage. And people who did not learned that before
| were treated like idiots.
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| I never said that, I only said that high school level stuff
| does not need a computer. Unless of course you have a class
| about computers.
| watwut wrote:
| "Nothing I learnt in high school required anything more
| than pen and paper." does not make exception for class
| about computers.
|
| And to add to it, those who had access to computer only
| in class were super behind those who had free access to
| it.
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| You keep misinterpreting what I have said. Nowhere I have
| written that I didn't have access to a computer at home
| or that kids should not have a private computer. I really
| don't understand why you keep hammering this point.
| dehugger wrote:
| Sorry to dash your hopes but you do, in fact, sound like a
| Luddite.
|
| Students have been using laptops in schools for nearly 20
| years.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Yes, but have learning outcomes improved or gotten worse?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Students have been using laptops in schools for nearly 20
| years.
|
| Typically, in a high school / college context, where study
| habits have already formed to some extent. My kids' middle
| school gave everyone a laptop, and it's been constant whack-
| a-mole for the teachers (YouTube, Fortnite, Reddit, etc.). I
| wish they'd get rid of them.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| I work in the space -- the kind of computer use has changed
| dramatically. Probably as an accident because of the
| expense/availability/space required/etc., it used to be the
| case that to use a computer you'd have to have some sort of
| pre-existing justification for it. This has, for all intents
| and purposes, almost completely flipped. In a great many
| school/districts kids either have access to an individual
| computer or readily available shared carts, and more often
| than not teachers and kids will spring to it almost
| reflexively. And, while there are many positives this can
| bring, so too it brings a lot of negatives. I think it's less
| the fact that they are using them but rather that their use
| isn't being dictated by some sort of pedagogical
| justification but rather because it's become the default.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| To the contrary: Laptops and other forms of digital devices can
| be used for _way better_ educational experience. Classes like
| maths, chemistry or physics can greatly benefit from
| interactive elements such as graphs or simulations.
|
| Besides, as our societies transform more and more into service
| sector economies based on IT services and media transforms as
| well (with the shift from traditional gatekeeper
| TV/radio/newspapers to Youtube/podcasts/a ton of services), it
| is imperative that children from a young age learn how to
| properly interact with computers and digital society. We're
| already seeing kids unable to judge the quality of online media
| sources, for example.
| [deleted]
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Yes, you do sound like a Luddite. Because computers is the
| integral part of the modern society, like it or not.
| mcv wrote:
| My son's programming classes would be pretty hard without his
| laptop.
|
| For primary school I might agree with you, but not for
| secondary school.
| 31337Logic wrote:
| Yes but not all students are in your son's programming class.
| :-/
| 31337Logic wrote:
| I'm with you, here. And I'm a seasoned IT Consultant of almost
| 3 decades. I've seen (and argued for) "both sides" of this
| argument and I now believe the net gains of giving each student
| a monetized ad-machine (aka Chromebook) are FAR outweighed by
| the net losses. I'm certainly not the first or only one
| advocating this, of course, and there is a large and ever-
| growing body of evidence to support the claim that Chromebooks
| specifically (i.e. not just a dumb laptop, disconnected from
| the Internet and social media) are hugely detrimental to
| students development, both academically and socially. Don't be
| lazy or in denial, a simple DuckDuckGo or Wikipedia search will
| provide many enlightening studies for you to read. Pick your
| favorite. For those in a rush, you can't go wrong by starting
| with the Your Undivided Attention podcast. Good luck, and
| here's to a balanced discussion that fairly represents BOTH
| sides of the story.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| I wouldn't have a career in IT if I hadn't spent many hours at
| ages 11 to 15 trying to get round my schools network security. My
| logon was frequently disabled for misuse and I was even suspended
| for a couple of days once but I learnt more that way than in any
| class I've ever taken.
| M1m1c wrote:
| I relate to this. As someone currently in high school, messing
| around with web proxies and code deployment sights, and web-
| based IDE's trying to run Dwarf Fortress in my school browser
| has taught me more about computers and networks then just about
| anything else. It is painfully easy to get around school
| filters these days. I've never really messed with unenrollment
| because you do need enrollment to access the testing websites
| but I've been trying to get into Developer Mode to get linux
| apps, but the IT guys must have thought ahead on that one.
| westurner wrote:
| Chromebooks don't even have a Terminal for the kids. Vim's
| great, but VScode with Jupyter Notebook support would make
| the computers we bought for them into great offline
| calculators, too.
|
| VSCode on a Chromebook requires VMs and Containers which
| require "Developer Tools" and "Powerwash"; or the APK repack
| of VSCodium that you can't even sideload and manually update
| sometimes (because it's not on the 15-30% cut, and must use
| their payment solution, app store with static analysis and
| code signing at upload).
|
| AFAIU, Chromebooks with Family Link and Chromebooks for
| Education do not have a Terminal, bash, git, VMs (KVM),
| Containers (Docker/Podman/LXC/LXD/gvisor), third-party repos
| with regular security updates, or even Python; which isn't
| really Linux (and Windows, Mac, and Linux do already at
| present support such _STEM for Education_ use cases).
|
| From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30168491 :
|
| > _Is WebVM a potential solution to "JupyterLite doesn't have
| a bash/zsh shell"? The current pyodide CPython Jupyter kernel
| takes like ~25s to start at present, and can load Python
| packages precompiled to WASM or unmodified Python packages
| with micropip: https://pyodide.org/en/latest/usage/loading-
| packages.html#lo... _
|
| There's also MambaLite, which is part of the emscripten-forge
| project; along with BinderLite.
| https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes (Edit: _Micropip
| or Mambalite or picomamba or Zig._ : "A 116kb WASM of Blink
| that lets you run x86_64 Linux binaries in the browser"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34376094 )
|
| It looks like there are now tests for VScode in the default
| _Power washable_ 'penguin' Debian VM that you get with
| Chromebook Developer Tools; but still the kids are denied VMs
| and Containers or local accounts (with kid-safe DoH/DoT at
| lesat) and so they can't run VScode locally on the
| Chromebooks that we bought for them.
|
| Why do I need "Developer Tools" access to run VScode and
| containers on a Chromebook; but not on a Windows, Mac or
| Linux computer? If containers are good enough for our
| workloads hosted in the cloud, they should be good enough for
| local coding and calculating in e.g. Python.
| https://github.com/quobit/awesome-python-in-
| education#jupyte...
| M1m1c wrote:
| I actually use a Web Assembly port of VIM on my school
| computer.
| westurner wrote:
| Nice. TIL about vim.wasm:
| https://github.com/rhysd/vim.wasm
|
| Jupyter Notebook and Jupyter Lab have a web terminal
| that's good enough to do SSH and Vim. Mosh Mobile Shell
| is more resilient to internet connection failure.
|
| Again though, Running everything in application-sandboxed
| WASM all as the current user is a security regression
| from the workload isolation features built into VMs and
| Containers (which Windows, Mac, and Linux computers
| support in the interests of STEM education and portable
| component reuse).
| swhan wrote:
| Good point. Wasn't aware of the Family Link restrictions.
| Will see what can be done here.
|
| Disclaimer: I work on ChromeOS.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Although I was already well into programming by then, my final
| "huh if I enjoy this so much I might as well pursue it as a
| career" push came from a similar incident, except it was about
| getting access to the faster wifi for the teachers in exchange
| for showing my calculus teacher how to bypass the website
| blocking.
| duxup wrote:
| My son (in jr high) updates me daily on his and other kids
| efforts to play games at school.
| kab0b wrote:
| I was really lucky that our Computer Teacher/IT guy (this was
| back in the early 2000s) was really cool and allowed us a bit
| of leeway to break things. After the first time we got caught
| (there was three of us) he sat down with us, and essentially
| gave us some rules of engagement, anything we got around, or
| defeated we had to write up a short report and turn it into
| him, explaining what we were able to accomplish, the level of
| access we were able to get and the steps to reproduce. So we
| did so, and he actually gave us class credits for it. (Our
| school system had some "special projects" class credits that
| could be earned to give students and teachers some leeway on
| allowing students to learn things that weren't part of the
| curriculum)
|
| We managed to figure out how to override our typing program to
| give certificates saying we typed 200wpm at 100% accuracy. By
| passed the internet filter to access gmail (back in it's early
| days, we held onto that ability for a while) and a few other
| things I forget about now. He was one of my favorite teachers.
| philipphutterer wrote:
| That sounds like this teacher understood what teaching means
| other than presenting the curriculum. Love it.
| sitkack wrote:
| > he sat down with us, and essentially gave us some rules of
| engagement, anything we got around, or defeated we had to
| write up a short report and turn it into him
|
| This is really wholesome. Like that guy. Be like that guy.
| knodi123 wrote:
| Exact same story. I was having way too easy a time in my comp
| sci class in high school, so I wrote a program that simulated
| our login screen, saved whatever you typed into the box to a
| text file in my home dir, gave the "bad username or password"
| error, and then seamlessly sent you to the real login screen.
|
| After a week, I'd stolen the credentials of everyone in my
| class and the class after mine. And then, I did... nothing with
| it, because I was already able to finish the homework in class
| and had a high grade.
|
| The teacher busted me because I had a file in my home dir
| called stolen_passwords.txt. But instead of punishing me, he
| made me help him patch all the security flaws I'd exploited. It
| inspired my decision to go to college for comp sci. Best high
| school teacher ever. (a few years later, I had graduated with a
| comp sci degree. and he was trying to recruit me into selling
| amway. oh well.)
| comice wrote:
| lol I did exactly this at school too. My first version wrote
| the passwords to local disk and whenever I logged in anywhere
| myself my login script would gather them up. Til I realised I
| could leave myself logged in and write to my home dir.
|
| I love how this same vulnerability was discovered
| independently and exploited by students all around the world!
| rez9x wrote:
| I had the 'benefit' of a poorer school district with basically
| no IT. The extent of blocks on our computer labs was an
| application running at startup. Being Windows 98, I just booted
| into DOS and renamed the executable.
|
| Teacher didn't care if we bypassed it, as long as we put it
| back before class was over.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Dad did a PhD in something with a lot of math and so we had a
| computer even when I was a kid. Got exposed at a young age.
|
| Eventually I figured out how to use the dial up to see naked
| pictures. Old man changed the dial-up password, wouldn't let us
| use the computer.
|
| Occasionally, when he was around he'd let me online for legit
| school stuff. I'd heard of keyloggers -- featured prominently
| in stories about catching cheating lovers -- so while allowed
| on for legitimate reasons I got on Altavista and was successful
| in downloading and installing one. Couple days later I had an
| opportunity to kick off the program while no one was around. It
| worked -- got the password.
|
| Ended up in military signals and then cyber. Now a fatass IT
| guy working remotely. Adversarial relationships spark learning,
| it seems, be it parents, school, war, etc.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-30 23:01 UTC)