Google has captured a large segment of the education market with Google Classroom and it's the most primitive software I use every single day.
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I’m reminded of the old faux Bell slogan: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”
@rk @futurebird From last week’s Monsterdon, Night of the Comet (1984): “I’m not the phone company. Nobody’s the phone company anymore!”
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I've used obscure minecraft mods with better features and UI than google classroom.
@futurebird
The shade... -
I wouldn't be shocked if someone at google was shocked to find out that they still were running Classroom... although they did try to put "AI" into it for a moment and the schools lost their mind so they made it possible to turn it off for a whole school.
And I suspect that sort of reaction makes them say "these users don't like change, they don't want improvements and new features"
But that is NOT true. I'm miserable.
@futurebird yeah, if it was about keeping us in the ecosystem it wouldn't be so bad we had to export & import docs to submit homework.
It really does feel like they got halfway to linking up a bunch of separate products (Drive, Gmail, Meet, etc) and then got bored and wandered off. Given Google's long and storied history of closing down services they've lost interest in, I could well believe Classroom just got forgotten. -
Google has captured a large segment of the education market with Google Classroom and it's the most primitive software I use every single day.
On the one hand adding too much stuff annoys edu customers. On the other hand, it just has NO FEATURES, nothing you expect from "classroom" software.
For example, do you want to show an answer key to students after they post their homework?
Gotta do that by hand. Like a cave person.
@futurebird my first tech job was back in 1998 working on education software where the frontend was in the little known macromedia director, i was an idiot 18 year old who had no idea what she was doing, and we still did a better job than this. honestly the state of tech has been in a downward spiral since the 2000s, and it's appalling what we all put up with because some billionaire forced it on us.
anyway, commiseration that you have to deal with this slop.
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The urge to just make something better myself washes over me like some kind of hot flash every day. I know it's a bigger project than it looks, but I swear to god I had palm OS software made with more consideration and care than this.
I don't get how people think the future is coming and just around the corner when most software is like this.
Classroom feels like it's from 2002
@futurebird i so miss palm os. Sigh.
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The urge to just make something better myself washes over me like some kind of hot flash every day. I know it's a bigger project than it looks, but I swear to god I had palm OS software made with more consideration and care than this.
I don't get how people think the future is coming and just around the corner when most software is like this.
Classroom feels like it's from 2002
*panting holing on to the arms of the chair*
"I could make a better LMS than this! It's just a database pointing to a file storage system with a calendar! I could do it!"
I wait for the feeling to pass, but it has been happening more frequently. In the corner of the room a little demon whispers "do it, do it on apache and use PHP and mySQL, you know the way"
I shake my head holding back the tears. I do not practice those dark arts any longer...
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@futurebird i so miss palm os. Sigh.
So much of it was made by people doing their very best, pushing the hardware to the limit. It was really elegant in many ways.
It occurs to me that we have never or maybe only rarely seen what it'd mean for modern hardware to be "pushed to its limits" like that.
Think of what might be possible.
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*panting holing on to the arms of the chair*
"I could make a better LMS than this! It's just a database pointing to a file storage system with a calendar! I could do it!"
I wait for the feeling to pass, but it has been happening more frequently. In the corner of the room a little demon whispers "do it, do it on apache and use PHP and mySQL, you know the way"
I shake my head holding back the tears. I do not practice those dark arts any longer...
@futurebird Squint a little, and that “demon” starts looking like your better angel instead…
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So much of it was made by people doing their very best, pushing the hardware to the limit. It was really elegant in many ways.
It occurs to me that we have never or maybe only rarely seen what it'd mean for modern hardware to be "pushed to its limits" like that.
Think of what might be possible.
A more extreme example of "pushing the hardware" is some of the programming for N64 games of all things.
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So much of it was made by people doing their very best, pushing the hardware to the limit. It was really elegant in many ways.
It occurs to me that we have never or maybe only rarely seen what it'd mean for modern hardware to be "pushed to its limits" like that.
Think of what might be possible.
@futurebird i ran my entire physical therapy practice on it and a folding keyboard. I created a custom database for my patient data, visit notes, & billing using a palm os relational database program called handbase. It seamlessly integrated with MS Access when i docked my palm pilot with my computer and created all the mail merge documents i needed to run my practice.
This was in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Nothing since has been as elegant and as useful.
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*panting holing on to the arms of the chair*
"I could make a better LMS than this! It's just a database pointing to a file storage system with a calendar! I could do it!"
I wait for the feeling to pass, but it has been happening more frequently. In the corner of the room a little demon whispers "do it, do it on apache and use PHP and mySQL, you know the way"
I shake my head holding back the tears. I do not practice those dark arts any longer...
@futurebird So, so many applications give me this itch, particularity business-related applications. "This is literally just the front end on a database. How did they screw this up so badly?" And it's not even that I don't understand the process well enough because I've been steeped in it for years. I know what it needs to do, I know the edge cases, etc. Give me a few months and I could do this!
But then I withdraw for a time, and leave Middle-Earth to its fate.
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So much of it was made by people doing their very best, pushing the hardware to the limit. It was really elegant in many ways.
It occurs to me that we have never or maybe only rarely seen what it'd mean for modern hardware to be "pushed to its limits" like that.
Think of what might be possible.
@futurebird @LJ My favourite example of this is the rainbow effects generator for the Spectrum. It literally looks impossible for the hardware to do it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum_graphic_modes#Software_Hi-Colour
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*panting holing on to the arms of the chair*
"I could make a better LMS than this! It's just a database pointing to a file storage system with a calendar! I could do it!"
I wait for the feeling to pass, but it has been happening more frequently. In the corner of the room a little demon whispers "do it, do it on apache and use PHP and mySQL, you know the way"
I shake my head holding back the tears. I do not practice those dark arts any longer...
@futurebird I remember when #SharePoint first came out and everyone thought I was a crazyperson because I kept yelling "It's just wiki! I was doing this for my classes last year! Why can't you see this? IT'S A WIKI!"
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*panting holing on to the arms of the chair*
"I could make a better LMS than this! It's just a database pointing to a file storage system with a calendar! I could do it!"
I wait for the feeling to pass, but it has been happening more frequently. In the corner of the room a little demon whispers "do it, do it on apache and use PHP and mySQL, you know the way"
I shake my head holding back the tears. I do not practice those dark arts any longer...
@futurebird Don’t do it. You don’t want to end up the admin of your own platform where everything really is your fault. It’s much better to come here and bitch about someone else’s software.
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@futurebird People choose to use Minecraft mods, based on utility & convenience.
Nobody chooses a Google or Microsoft product, it's forced by IT.
@mdhughes
Software is sold to Finance bros and other execs. IT is told what to do and we do it, and then hear from everyone about how shit it all is.The admin side of Google education/classroom is a mess. Licenses are bought in batches and you'd better have enough student ones to cover all the "free" licenses for the staff.
@futurebird -
@futurebird Squint a little, and that “demon” starts looking like your better angel instead…
They are so often fallen angles aren't they? But do we forget why they have fallen?
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*panting holing on to the arms of the chair*
"I could make a better LMS than this! It's just a database pointing to a file storage system with a calendar! I could do it!"
I wait for the feeling to pass, but it has been happening more frequently. In the corner of the room a little demon whispers "do it, do it on apache and use PHP and mySQL, you know the way"
I shake my head holding back the tears. I do not practice those dark arts any longer...
@futurebird have you ever tried moodle? I used it a little when I took an instructional design class that used it and then used it to run a course once. It worked pretty well for what I needed, though I didn't use many of the features. Many cpanel hosts (like @reclaimhosting ) offer a one click install
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They are so often fallen angles aren't they? But do we forget why they have fallen?
@futurebird For thinking maybe *they* should be in charge?
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Carving the geometry assignment on the wall would be very similar TBH.
Speaking of "old textbooks" I have an unverified notion that these carvings of animal footprints might have served as some kind of textbook or learning aid.
It's just a notion, but considering how accurate the representations are I think it's worth considering if this library of animal footprints was used to train young people about the fauna of their region.
https://futurebird.tumblr.com/post/740768198010535936/is-this-the-first-human-made-textbook
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Speaking of "old textbooks" I have an unverified notion that these carvings of animal footprints might have served as some kind of textbook or learning aid.
It's just a notion, but considering how accurate the representations are I think it's worth considering if this library of animal footprints was used to train young people about the fauna of their region.
https://futurebird.tumblr.com/post/740768198010535936/is-this-the-first-human-made-textbook
There is a bit of "hammer sees nothing but nails" about my thinking here. Since I'm a teacher I tend to think "this would be really great for teaching" probably too often.
