I don't try to do any sort of "productive" work on iPhone/iPad because I simply don't know how to. Very simple file operations are often so unnecessarily complicated.
Exactly why I don't have an iPad. I would like one, but iOS isn't a serious operating system.
Instead of a Macbook with touch, I want an iPad with MacOS, for the situation where I want to watch movies on the go, but also get serious work done every once in a while.
The one use case I have for an iPad is the pencil for screen sharing / white boarding on zoom, although my chicken scratch writing may not come across well. I don't think it would work for me on a laptop screen either, I need it sitting flat to draw diagrams or overlays.
Getting a keyboard and touchpad case setup totally changed my view on them for productivity. As a primary driver I'd still opt for a laptop but they work great when traveling.
Downvoters: welcome. What's upsetting you about what I wrote? I need to know so I can tell the correct lie for you in the future. Do you just instinctively downvote stories that suggest iPads can be used for "real" work? Do you know, cos your mate down the pub told you, that iPads don't just open files directly but need a masonic hand-shake? Was I too terse in my reply? Honestly, give me some feedback here.
I've never heard of "Clever" but it looks like that's the real problem? And some need for a Google integration. So they're making kids use two separate online services just to see a presentation! There is surely a better way, whoever is mandating these platforms has to be being bribed.
Clever is garbage. They claim it's free for the school, but end up charging vendors for connecting. So vendors increase their prices, but Clever doesn't allow vendors to say that's why they increased their price or charged an extra fee.
The complaint is entirely about the school's software stack including "Clever" and Canvas:
> login to clever
> click google profile
> type in his long terrible email he is required to remember 32lastnamefirstinital at schoolname.k12.state.us
> type in his equally annoying password
> click canvas
> click log in via google again (because????)
> Click google profile that he already logged into
> click class name
> click modules
> scroll about 40 links until he spots the powerpoint in the sea of other links with similar names
> click download powerpoint
> click open external link to keynote (because the ipad can't run powerpoint)
> turn the ipad vertically to reveal the blue "open" button
> turn off screen lock
> Click open which was not previously visible on the horizontal ipad
> hit play button
> hit present on this device. Take notes.
Educational software is a dumpster fire. The people making the purchasing decisions never have to use the software. It's just sales people tracking down the person with purchasing authority and schmoozing them until the PO comes through.
There are some schools and districts where the IT people take their jobs seriously and actually care about making things work well. Administrators need to close the loop and hold IT accountable for bad experiences and purchase decisions, and they need to drop contracts with services that aren't performing.
This anecdote is what happens when IT doesn't care and administrators never hold anyone accountable.
Administrators are the ones making purchasing decisions. IT might make recommendations, but it's someone in administration (or multiple someones) who makes the final decision on what software the district buys for its many students.
Maybe what's needed - broadly - is some sort of "choosing good software vendors" education, for people in non-IT fields. Medical care would certainly benefit from similar education.
In the 90s my parents were briefly involved in designing that sort of curriculum in a for profit space (for kids) [1] and they encountered all sorts of problems in that 1) software vendor advice changed roughly every six months (often for no particular reason than a brand got bored and changed names/rearranged cheese or went out of business or got bought by some other conglomerate got worse and a new alternative needed, 2) nobody really wanted to pay for the education of which software to buy/use, and most crucially, 3) nobody thought they needed that education.
Parents assumed kids should naturally get it from the school systems. School systems don't have the resources to teach it in most places (and where they did it has always been underfunded/under-appreciated). Parents themselves assumed they were smart enough to figure the stuff out, when they had a chance to get around it it, probably.
It sort of feels like software education has been left in a permanent "Somebody Else's Problem" field. Both in learning it personally and in finding someone to teach it.
That's a horrifying read. Our school uses Chromebooks for K-8, but I'm sure there are plenty of iPads floating around pretending to be a proper replacement for a laptop. For the IEP student in question, my goodness this must feel like pulling teeth just to keep up with the class. I don't remember it being this bad on my iPod Touch in high school, but back then was the dawn of iWork for iOS.
My youngest has to suffer Google Classroom on mandatory iPads at school. It is, to be polite, a complete pile of donkey shit. The amount of times work can’t be done because something is broken or corrupted or doesn’t display properly or there are auth or consistency problems is unreal. That is if you can find the work in the first place. On top of that hardware problems galore like the mandatory keyboard cases dropping connection every 30 minutes or so. Or the school’s AP and Internet crapping out or being overloaded.
I approached the school about it two years ago and they were dismissive and ignorant.
I have to pay £14 a month for that too.
They also have Chromebooks but they were post Covid emergency purchases and they are all end of life and need replacing. Hence the iPads because we have to pay for the renewal then not the school. And the chromebooks were just as terrible.
I have heard of entire subject lessons being wasted on IT issues. And children getting detention because something was broken.
It’s a kafkaesque nightmare. They should go back to paper for most work.
My kid has some mild attention issues, keeping track of assignments is only made more difficult by Google classrooms. Some assignments are in Google Classrooms, some are there but only placeholders as there was a handout, some aren't in there at all.
I doubt Google Classroom itself is the problem at all, that's pretty rock-solid in my experience.
But with third-party auth, the third-party add-ons and integrations, that's where it turns into complete crap. Those are the things that often tend to be terribly engineered.
Classroom pretty much works like a dream if you stick to materials in Docs/Sheets/Slides and do the grading within Classroom as well. And if each student has their own device so they don't need to log in again every day, even better.
But schools purchase all of these integrations and then expect the teachers to use them and then the quality of the user experience goes down the toilet. But the fault is pretty much entirely with the integrations, in my experience. Because some are quite reliable, it can definitely be done. But a lot of these companies just don't care.
I am using YouTube website, on Firefox, GrapheneOS. If I click on youtube logo, it will close the video.
what am I missing from not using the app? It also continues playing when phone closed/black screen
Do you mean the iOS YT app? It's at most three, two if you allow a swipe. Swipe down on the video (moves it to a smaller view in the lower-right) > tap the X in the upper right of the video. Or tap the video (to bring up controls) > tap the down-arrow in the upper left (moves to the same smaller view) > tap the same X in the corner.
I just tried on an iPad, so it's possible it's a different experience, but it was only 3: swipe down (exit's fullscreen) > swipe down (same flow as before) > X in the corner.
When I taught undergrads, most people taught from personal ipads. I ditched mine and switched to Android because they were so bad about this: tap,tap,tap,tap, seemingly endless tapping for simple file operations. And if you're teaching in smallish seminars, you're constantly referencing, sending, receiving, grading a million documents. An inefficient pdf opening sequence is going to be repeated 60 times for each assignment.
Why are kindergartners being given chromebooks? Why are they logging in with QR codes? Why is anyone using a password, without a vault, in a multi-login flow?
That's the real horror of that thread. Our kids are going to grow up illiterate and pwned.
To me it appears that they could have just logged directly to Canvas to get the file. And then it appears that files have been named poorly and perhaps either get the PowerPoint or put the files in Keynote.
The teacher used to show up with a stack of printouts they made before class and hand them around. Thank god we've finally eliminated that inefficiency.
Maybe, but other UXs are notably worse. Capitalism may not be the best, but it's the best we've come up with so far. Unfortunately, at least in the US, it's crony capitalism.
steps 1-11 could apply to anything. Can we compare number of actual vendor specific steps if that's how its going to be framed? How many clicks does it take on a real computer?
This feels both like a result of and an emblematic example of bureaucracy. I do believe that done right, technology like this can improve the educational experience. However, there's so many different moving parts and rules that come along with the technology that in practice the teacher would have been better off xeroxing the presentation to give students individual physical copies like we did 25+ years ago.
Bureaucracy is interesting. People love to blame it for outcomes, which is fair, but when there's a catastrophic outcome, (not necessarily the same) people will also say that there should have been a rule, or better yet, the process that lead to the outcome should not have been possible.
In the spirit of curiosity, when I run into an especially irritating piece of bureaucracy, I like to try to think of the problems it was crafted to avoid. While that will rarely convince me that the current system is the best possible one, it does often convince me that the problem is harder than I thought.
As a new parent I was surprised that schools have even gotten into a state where iPads or Chromebooks are used regularly in the classroom. I don't understand how kids can learn on them.
iPads especially, they aren't a tool for productive work. Not many people use iPads professionally - they are designed for consuming. If I was in school today I think the distractions they provide would make me a far worse student.
I was issued an iPad in high school in like 2014. Even then, they were distracting. We all played games on them. They did have some benefits, though. They ensured that every kid consistently had a small, portable, fairly rugged device to take home so that they could take online quizzes, write essays, do digital homework assignments, do research or reading assignments, scan paper documents, do video assignments, check schedules and announcements, etc., all without requiring parents to spend hundreds of dollars on devices for their kids.
Our school district uses Lenovo laptops and Microsoft for everything. My daughter couldn't do her homework yesterday b/c of the Microsoft outage. They use teams for absolutely everything.
I have seen tons of university students taking note on their iPad with a pencil. Felt like a legit usage: read the course material on the iPad instead of printing everything, annotate PDFs, take notes.
Back in my days we were printing the slides and annotating (sometimes) them. That was a big waste of paper.
I see iPads (class 7 to 13, german school system) very positive. Let me just point out 3 aspects:
My students can really work with book or materials (make a photo, then annotate, cut, copy paste, extend the pages ...)
It added a lot to how I teach (make a podcast, produce videos, simulate, ...)
And as parent: I was more than happy when my son had (for the first time) all learning materials together in one place and not scattered in bags, on the bed, in the school locker...
Let me assure you from personal experience that iPads can (used right) contribute to better education.
the amount of "better education" we would have with kids driving a desktop/tower running a proper desktop (Linux) is immeasurable better than a locked down system like Appleland - tech literacy is literally one of the most discussed/emergent topics, be at the ed. tech field or traditional discussions about pedagogy
[0] probably over hour 600 on pedagogic scientific research and other podcasts talking exclusively about it
I agree with the importance of tech literacy and having a Linux-box could be way to achieve this but I hope you will grant me that its possible that in my subjects (Biology and German language/literature) an iPad is of greater use (as a tool outside, in the lab, to produce something cool with language) than a desktop pc. I don't see them as mutual exclusive.
which solution iPad has that can't be re-created in Linuxland? given AI, the possibility of doing a clone being quite cheaper than 5 years ago... now the trade-off of teaching and promoting freedom principles Linux surf (the GPL itself is a GREAT example) and allow users to have, against something hostile (whatever you say about Apple hardware and it's ecosystem, it's a net negative company for society) by a monopoly-like tech giant, on my opinion it's non-negotiable! i believe education is one of the most revolutionary (effective) acts we can do and just by excluding the dialogue FOSS can promote, make it instantly a great loss
i still tangle my head till today when proprietary musical software discussions emerge, on HN that's even more surprising, and no Csound, pd is cited even when those have decades old mature and updated codebases, with efficient DSP programmed by academics, all free of price with very permissive licenses - Bitwig costs 399 USD and that's like a lot for a lot of people - that's just a silly example, i'm not even getting into ed. tech software (for educators or kids) ecosystem which sometimes i still have a hard time why someone don't just learn Emacs org-mode for 1 week and stop using N services their school have to pay a subscription... Apple hardware, often deprecated much faster than hardware which run libre software and not a great monkey-see-monkey-do example on how teaching how important is rights of repair and permacomputing principles
> which solution iPad has that can't be re-created in Linuxland
- The school goes to a supplier and order 500 iPads and says they want them preloaded with X and X apps and be centrally managed by their Device Management software.
I love Linux, but nobody is creating Linux tablets and supplying them to schools at discounted rates and pre-configuring them with MDM ready out of the box.
Again, I agree with you: all the points of your first paragraph are valid to some extent.
But sometimes a totally dumb and closed system like an iPad is a feature.
It is so simple that Students (from 10 to 19 years old) and teachers (from 25 to 70) can use it. It is so closed down that the teachers can easily and reliably distribute tasks, apps, restrictions and don't have to deal (they will stand no chance) with students tampering with their systems.
It would be great when all school subjects would address FOSS and the impact of closed systems on society but they also have to address their core curriculum. Here I see the possibilities that the iPad opens up as a net positive.
> My students can really work with book or materials (make a photo, then annotate, cut, copy paste, extend the pages ...)
What's the point of that? Seems like unproductive busywork. How does it help with memorization and brain training? (Or isn't that the point of school anymore?)
Some of the pain in this specific example case seems to be haven gotten into a state where both iPads and Chromebooks are regularly used side by side in the classroom. They are using Google Workspace accounts with a custom SSO "app" on an iPad presumably so that everything is synchronized with Chromebooks, too.
The amount of failed digitization in primary/secondary education is astounding. It's a tax on parenthood in favor of the school system. Deficits are paid for out of the children's education. Each new system that comes along is just https://xkcd.com/927/.
Handouts just need to be printed and books reused. None of the other stuff is useful or helpful. And don't get me started on the "gamification" of every learning task.
Everything feels so cumbersome. I click on a link in some app which takes me to their login which takes me to MSFT login which takes me to the 2FA provider which asks me for a passkey which takes me back to MSFT which asks me whether to remember which takes me back to my app which forgot the redirect on the way which takes me back to the home view from which I navigate back to where I wanted to go where I can finally see what I wanted to see. Surely there must be a better way.
I really hate this bullshit "security". Why on earth do I have to log in every single day? If anything, it gives an attacker more chances to either steal my password, or makes me more likely to be phished because logging in is so automatic now.
It has negative security. Log me in for a fucking month, stop wasting a minute of my time every day!
It's also crazy that as far as technology has advanced, the concept of the username/password is still so prevalent. Passkeys are sort of changing things, it all still feels decidedly low-tech.
What is really crazy is that things that should be just an application locally installed on the device (such as PowerPoint) need a login at all.
There's a secondary issue of schools pushing children to use proprietary applications when perfectly serviceable alternatives exist (especially for school level work).
How the hell we all normalized this crap is maddening.
It's not even new. 20 years ago I got a bad grade in highschool because I used StarOffice and not Office 2003 for a project
My father and I had an unreasonably long conversation with the dean of students about how requiring someone to purchase a $300 software suite for a basic highschool English class was egregious
One of the "best" parts being the first one of those was meant to be an "SSO" but apparently is design-by-committee and very bad at it. (Requiring too frequent logins, not saving usernames between logins [for kids?!], requiring login dances at downstream logins.)
Username/password is the easiest way to log in, assuming there is no stupid format requirements. It's just two strings stored in your password manager. The most retarded way to implement log in is actually magic email link, which requires opening your email client, waiting for the email to arrive, and copying the code. If you want to make it even worse, you can require that to be done using the same browser that is trying to log into the account.
Passkeys. That has both and it can’t be set insecurely, written on paper or given to an Indian call centre who assures you they are from the finance department.
Passkeys as they are currently-marketed are resident credentials. This means a passkey stored on your Yubikey (or smartphone, or Windows account, or...) is not only a private key, but also contains a UID to identify it. A website doing authentication can trivially use this to look up which user it is associated with. Very convenient for single-press login, but it requires a decent bunch of per-website storage on the hardware token. Which is of course a net positive for the big tech companies, because it forced you into using smartphones as the token, and doing silly things like cloud sync with them.
The original FIDO U2F credentials were not resident. You'd enter your username, and the website would sent over a bunch of opaque blobs representing the associated hardware tokens. The hardware token would decrypt their blob using a key derived from a combination of the website's domain name and the hardware token's single stored secret, and then do the whole auth shenanigans using the data retrieved from the blob. Yubico invented a very nice protocol[0] around this "server-stored blob" idea to allow registering a backup security token, but the strong push towards insecure smartphone-stored cloud-synced Passkeys of course killed this.
Making it phishing-resistant, for starters. And having a built-in way to prevent people from reusing their password across multiple websites, so that any single compromise doesn't instantly turns into having all of their accounts pwned.
I don't remember the last time I had a workday that didn't involve logging into something that I definitely logged into not very long ago, that I use every single day, and it's so, so, so fucking tedious.
And it doesn't escape my notice that all the fucking things I have to log into over and over and over are using Microsoft auth. Which granted, I think every office worker would notice that just from the ubiquity of their software, but still. And, on top of it, Microsoft's login flows are remarkably, consistently clunky. The forms jump all over the place and it has to refresh the page like 5 times as it's processing your credentials, and lord help you if Outlook needed you to sign in and silently opened that stupid auth window, because if you go through the entire thing, odds are great that you'll get a "security token expired, please do it again" message at the end. Like I dunno personally I wouldn't get a security token until the user has actually interacted in some way with the stupid form but what do I know I've only been making software for like 13 fucking years.
Oh yeah, bonus points: I use the passkey thing for my MS Auth app on my phone, and every single goddamned time I sign in, it asks me if I want to.... wait for it... create a passkey.
Just, truly the biggest circus with the most clowns over there.
> lord help you if Outlook needed you to sign in and silently opened that stupid auth window, because if you go through the entire thing, odds are great that you'll get a "security token expired, please do it again" message at the end.
Whenever I see the Outlook auth box I mash in some gibberish for my password to immediately get the "expired" notice so that I can enter my real auth info.
So if any admin happens to look, my baseline for incorrect passwords entered is 50%.
Fortunately I don't have to deal with Microsoft professionally, but anything Xbox related is also such a massive pain. More than 3 times now I've tried to login and got into an endless login loop.
If you look that up you'll see that people have been encountering that for over a decade.
I simply and truly don't get it.
Microsoft must have at least 80.000 devs. No one there ever wanted to fix this?
Microsoft's auto-logout appears to be implemented in the frontend. If I leave the Outlook or Teams tabs opened but idle for a few hours I get kicked and have to log in again, but I have an addon that will unload tabs I haven't interacted with for an hour, and one day I noticed that if I click away and intentionally let those tabs unload when I'm not using them, I can stay logged in for weeks or months.
I genuinely could not care less about it. Most of it is trivial click-through session validation (Github -> Microsoft auth -> Github) where most of the pain is solved by auto-redirect, the rest is auto-filled by my password manager - including 2FA, although that part is technically probably not the best idea.
If I ever have to manually fill anything in, it is almost certainly going to be a phishing attempt. It immediately jumps out as "this is unusual, something is wrong here".
The only thing which bothers me is email login links, but luckily I don't daily any apps which use them.
Yes, web apps should support passkeys directly and have a "log in with your passkey" button if there's a cookie indicating that you previously logged in with one. Also, don't screw up the UI by then sending you an email or text message with a confirmation code.
(If it's a browser that you haven't used before, perhaps be a little more paranoid.)
Yeah. The other day I registered into something using my institutional login (with 2FA). And then i have to activate 2FA in the relying party as well. So everytime i login there i need 2 2FAs.
Most of my current company runs on Teams, which is such a massive self-inflicted gunshot wound. It must cost billions in lost productivity across the globe, just dealing with how terrible it is.
A few examples that happen pretty much every day:
1) The teams interface takes upwards of 60 seconds to load, from the moment I've gone through the auth process and the Teams logo pops up, from when the UI actually renders the sidebars and the first chat window.
2) It frequently fails to load new messages after resuming an existing session for a few minutes. It shows everything up to date, you can navigate between chats, but no new messages or unread message counts update. Sometimes this takes a few minutes, then it suddenly works, but it's impossible to tell if it's working and you don't actually have any messages or if it's in this limbo state.
3) When you need to reauth, the app seems to work, again showing all the previous messages, but there's this tiny toast at the top saying that you need to log out.
4) The log out button doesn't actually work. On Chrome, I've had to use devtools to clear my cookies & sessions for it to get into a valid state where it would actually let me sign in again. The Mac app just goes unresponsive and needs to be forced to quit.
This is basically rage bait, posted by a (supposed) teacher to Reddit, and now reposted here to HN. I flagged it.
The alleged chain of clicks and typing is not really plausible unless the kid just got handed a brand new machine on the first day of school. These are services that kids use everyday that employ cookies to persist session, just like any other web service.
I was literally browsing the Teachers sub while procrastinating on studying for a midterm, read that post, and was curious what people would have to say about it on HN (in all fairness, I suppose at least part of me was also like "Wow this would do numbers on HN).
It's fair to complain that you don't find it constructive, interesting, or educational, but I promise it was at least an organic process.
Seeing reddit pushed hard on the front page after its become a login online site I wonder if this is yet another push to try and make the site relevant again after a decade of mismanagement, stackoverflow 2.0 if you'd like.
144 comments
[ 1040 ms ] story [ 437 ms ] threadI don't try to do any sort of "productive" work on iPhone/iPad because I simply don't know how to. Very simple file operations are often so unnecessarily complicated.
Instead of a Macbook with touch, I want an iPad with MacOS, for the situation where I want to watch movies on the go, but also get serious work done every once in a while.
The example in this story is to do with other cruft that schools have installed.
Back in my day we double clicked a ppt on a flash drive, and we liked it!
> login to clever
> click google profile
> type in his long terrible email he is required to remember 32lastnamefirstinital at schoolname.k12.state.us
> type in his equally annoying password
> click canvas
> click log in via google again (because????)
> Click google profile that he already logged into
> click class name
> click modules
> scroll about 40 links until he spots the powerpoint in the sea of other links with similar names
> click download powerpoint
> click open external link to keynote (because the ipad can't run powerpoint)
> turn the ipad vertically to reveal the blue "open" button
> turn off screen lock
> Click open which was not previously visible on the horizontal ipad
> hit play button
> hit present on this device. Take notes.
Educational software is a dumpster fire. The people making the purchasing decisions never have to use the software. It's just sales people tracking down the person with purchasing authority and schmoozing them until the PO comes through.
There are some schools and districts where the IT people take their jobs seriously and actually care about making things work well. Administrators need to close the loop and hold IT accountable for bad experiences and purchase decisions, and they need to drop contracts with services that aren't performing.
This anecdote is what happens when IT doesn't care and administrators never hold anyone accountable.
They are a school administrator whose job description, formal training, etc. os in education, not vendor selection and certainly not SSO.
Source: county PTA and working with the school board.
Parents assumed kids should naturally get it from the school systems. School systems don't have the resources to teach it in most places (and where they did it has always been underfunded/under-appreciated). Parents themselves assumed they were smart enough to figure the stuff out, when they had a chance to get around it it, probably.
It sort of feels like software education has been left in a permanent "Somebody Else's Problem" field. Both in learning it personally and in finding someone to teach it.
[1] It was a franchise called Futurekids.
I approached the school about it two years ago and they were dismissive and ignorant.
I have to pay £14 a month for that too.
They also have Chromebooks but they were post Covid emergency purchases and they are all end of life and need replacing. Hence the iPads because we have to pay for the renewal then not the school. And the chromebooks were just as terrible.
I have heard of entire subject lessons being wasted on IT issues. And children getting detention because something was broken.
It’s a kafkaesque nightmare. They should go back to paper for most work.
But with third-party auth, the third-party add-ons and integrations, that's where it turns into complete crap. Those are the things that often tend to be terribly engineered.
Classroom pretty much works like a dream if you stick to materials in Docs/Sheets/Slides and do the grading within Classroom as well. And if each student has their own device so they don't need to log in again every day, even better.
But schools purchase all of these integrations and then expect the teachers to use them and then the quality of the user experience goes down the toilet. But the fault is pretty much entirely with the integrations, in my experience. Because some are quite reliable, it can definitely be done. But a lot of these companies just don't care.
> School governing bodies and local authorities cannot charge for:
> [...]
> education provided during school hours (including the supply of any materials, books, instruments or other equipment)
[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5af99c8ae5274...
But I suppose education is a business and they need to keep inventing new "methods".
16 is insane, though.
1. touch screen to see controls
2. touch lower-right -><-
3. touch screen to see \/ in upper left
4. touch \/
5. touch X
If the video play to the end (1) and (2) are replaced with touch X, for a total of 4.
That's the real horror of that thread. Our kids are going to grow up illiterate and pwned.
Google Docs/Slides/Sheets masquerading as EdTech
https://occupysaas.com/ and OSS are the future.
In the spirit of curiosity, when I run into an especially irritating piece of bureaucracy, I like to try to think of the problems it was crafted to avoid. While that will rarely convince me that the current system is the best possible one, it does often convince me that the problem is harder than I thought.
1. Open canvas on laptop
2. Open canvas quiz
3. Write answers on paper
4. Scan paper with office lens
5. Export document from office lens
6. Upload document to google drive
7. Open google drive on laptop
8. Download document from google drive
9. Upload document to canvas
10. Realize you forgot to write your student id on page 2, write and go back to step 4
iPads especially, they aren't a tool for productive work. Not many people use iPads professionally - they are designed for consuming. If I was in school today I think the distractions they provide would make me a far worse student.
Back in my days we were printing the slides and annotating (sometimes) them. That was a big waste of paper.
Is it just grading and parental access?
My students can really work with book or materials (make a photo, then annotate, cut, copy paste, extend the pages ...)
It added a lot to how I teach (make a podcast, produce videos, simulate, ...)
And as parent: I was more than happy when my son had (for the first time) all learning materials together in one place and not scattered in bags, on the bed, in the school locker...
Let me assure you from personal experience that iPads can (used right) contribute to better education.
It doesn't just have to be at school. Screens after school affect learning in school.
[0] probably over hour 600 on pedagogic scientific research and other podcasts talking exclusively about it
i still tangle my head till today when proprietary musical software discussions emerge, on HN that's even more surprising, and no Csound, pd is cited even when those have decades old mature and updated codebases, with efficient DSP programmed by academics, all free of price with very permissive licenses - Bitwig costs 399 USD and that's like a lot for a lot of people - that's just a silly example, i'm not even getting into ed. tech software (for educators or kids) ecosystem which sometimes i still have a hard time why someone don't just learn Emacs org-mode for 1 week and stop using N services their school have to pay a subscription... Apple hardware, often deprecated much faster than hardware which run libre software and not a great monkey-see-monkey-do example on how teaching how important is rights of repair and permacomputing principles
- The school goes to a supplier and order 500 iPads and says they want them preloaded with X and X apps and be centrally managed by their Device Management software.
I love Linux, but nobody is creating Linux tablets and supplying them to schools at discounted rates and pre-configuring them with MDM ready out of the box.
But sometimes a totally dumb and closed system like an iPad is a feature. It is so simple that Students (from 10 to 19 years old) and teachers (from 25 to 70) can use it. It is so closed down that the teachers can easily and reliably distribute tasks, apps, restrictions and don't have to deal (they will stand no chance) with students tampering with their systems.
It would be great when all school subjects would address FOSS and the impact of closed systems on society but they also have to address their core curriculum. Here I see the possibilities that the iPad opens up as a net positive.
What's the point of that? Seems like unproductive busywork. How does it help with memorization and brain training? (Or isn't that the point of school anymore?)
Tons of people in the arts do, it's a bit silly to claim otherwise.
It’s like, they are right in the middle of the tech gadget spectrum, and they want to be a bit of everything but are not really good at anything.
PCs, laptops, smartphones, even smartwatches all have the right form factor for what their use is. Tablets? Meh.
Handouts just need to be printed and books reused. None of the other stuff is useful or helpful. And don't get me started on the "gamification" of every learning task.
It has negative security. Log me in for a fucking month, stop wasting a minute of my time every day!
There's a secondary issue of schools pushing children to use proprietary applications when perfectly serviceable alternatives exist (especially for school level work).
How the hell we all normalized this crap is maddening.
My father and I had an unreasonably long conversation with the dean of students about how requiring someone to purchase a $300 software suite for a basic highschool English class was egregious
How can you improve on it? You have the identity part and the auth part. What is better than that?
The original FIDO U2F credentials were not resident. You'd enter your username, and the website would sent over a bunch of opaque blobs representing the associated hardware tokens. The hardware token would decrypt their blob using a key derived from a combination of the website's domain name and the hardware token's single stored secret, and then do the whole auth shenanigans using the data retrieved from the blob. Yubico invented a very nice protocol[0] around this "server-stored blob" idea to allow registering a backup security token, but the strong push towards insecure smartphone-stored cloud-synced Passkeys of course killed this.
[0]: https://www.yubico.com/blog/yubico-proposes-webauthn-protoco...
And it doesn't escape my notice that all the fucking things I have to log into over and over and over are using Microsoft auth. Which granted, I think every office worker would notice that just from the ubiquity of their software, but still. And, on top of it, Microsoft's login flows are remarkably, consistently clunky. The forms jump all over the place and it has to refresh the page like 5 times as it's processing your credentials, and lord help you if Outlook needed you to sign in and silently opened that stupid auth window, because if you go through the entire thing, odds are great that you'll get a "security token expired, please do it again" message at the end. Like I dunno personally I wouldn't get a security token until the user has actually interacted in some way with the stupid form but what do I know I've only been making software for like 13 fucking years.
Oh yeah, bonus points: I use the passkey thing for my MS Auth app on my phone, and every single goddamned time I sign in, it asks me if I want to.... wait for it... create a passkey.
Just, truly the biggest circus with the most clowns over there.
Whenever I see the Outlook auth box I mash in some gibberish for my password to immediately get the "expired" notice so that I can enter my real auth info.
So if any admin happens to look, my baseline for incorrect passwords entered is 50%.
If you look that up you'll see that people have been encountering that for over a decade.
I simply and truly don't get it.
Microsoft must have at least 80.000 devs. No one there ever wanted to fix this?
If I ever have to manually fill anything in, it is almost certainly going to be a phishing attempt. It immediately jumps out as "this is unusual, something is wrong here".
The only thing which bothers me is email login links, but luckily I don't daily any apps which use them.
(If it's a browser that you haven't used before, perhaps be a little more paranoid.)
A few examples that happen pretty much every day:
1) The teams interface takes upwards of 60 seconds to load, from the moment I've gone through the auth process and the Teams logo pops up, from when the UI actually renders the sidebars and the first chat window.
2) It frequently fails to load new messages after resuming an existing session for a few minutes. It shows everything up to date, you can navigate between chats, but no new messages or unread message counts update. Sometimes this takes a few minutes, then it suddenly works, but it's impossible to tell if it's working and you don't actually have any messages or if it's in this limbo state.
3) When you need to reauth, the app seems to work, again showing all the previous messages, but there's this tiny toast at the top saying that you need to log out.
4) The log out button doesn't actually work. On Chrome, I've had to use devtools to clear my cookies & sessions for it to get into a valid state where it would actually let me sign in again. The Mac app just goes unresponsive and needs to be forced to quit.
The alleged chain of clicks and typing is not really plausible unless the kid just got handed a brand new machine on the first day of school. These are services that kids use everyday that employ cookies to persist session, just like any other web service.
It's fair to complain that you don't find it constructive, interesting, or educational, but I promise it was at least an organic process.
Just like any good web service. Many web services are terrible. I have to use one such every day, it's awful