Allow me to share a personal story, I think it is the best way to get my point across
I was born in the early 2000s, grew up in small town Nova Scotia. When I used a computer in elementary school it had Open Office, Firefox and a bunch of Tux games. In the rare case that we submitted something online we used Moodle. Without knowing it I was starting my journey into open source software.
When I got to middle school however, things changed. Google was the new name in town. Shiny new Chromebooks where hauled out in carts to every classroom and every student was mandated a Google account. From this point on the majority of school work was written in Google Docs and submitted to Google Classroom.
At the time I was too young to fully grasp what was happening, I didn’t understand contracts or the difference between a private American company and community made free open source software.
By the time I was in high school the entire fleet of Chromebooks had been replaced at least twice. The older fleets now fulfilling the role of electronic landfill. Somewhere along the line my school board had fallen for the bait, and once the contracts were signed our technology education was the property of Google.
Then education and technology became the same thing. In 2021 we all had to switch to online “learning”, I use quotes because schooling became the equivalent of flash card quizzes over a video call. There was nothing left but Google, they won.
I graduated in 2022 and went to Acadia university. Google was gone, I was now mandated a Microslop account (of course they hadn’t earned that title yet). Really it was just trading one giant American company for another.
I didn’t last long there, I ended up flunking out of university and coming back home, saving up to go to Nova Scotia Community College.
I am sure you can guess how this story is going. Microslop account, only now they are living up to their name. What was just a few years ago a cloud storage and email provider is now entirely Copilot. The landing page is even an AI chat prompt.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised but it does make me concerned.
We are in a trade war against the United States and these tech companies have proven to time and time again work with Trump’s regime.
How are we supposed to trust them with our entire education system?
It wasn’t always like this, we had a foundation built upon open source software and it was gutted because of shitty deals with predatory companies.
I want a future where Canadian education is Canadian education, not just another client of the American machine.
Thank you for reading my story. I know I might dox myself by saying the school names but I want to name and shame.
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Best things you can do is write letters to people and agencies, get some people thinking. Next best thing you can do is start using FOSS yourself. My coding abilities are html in the 90’s and enough Java Script to pass my 100 level comp sci class. I wish I had the money to add to the communism that is the OSS world but I provide data for Crowdsec and I share the Debian and RaspberryPi OS’s torrents every three months, when they are released.
I happen to personally know of a Dean in a major Nova Scotia Uni who was (and probably still is) using chat gpt to write memos, correspondents. They’re paying this person nearly 180k a year.
All schools in North America are beholden to Google. This shouldn’t be news, although it probably is to some. Google has been lobbying and cutting deals every government and school board it can get its hooks on for a couple decades. They make the old Apple Education program look insignificant.
Should we trust them? No. Do we have an alternative? Also no. I want you to consider the scale of the problem here. The Chromebook itself is sold nearly at cost and often below cost. Why? Because Google isn’t making money off the Chromebook. It’s just a gateway to a massive networked ecosystem of software products and services. They’re called “Big Tech” for a reason, the massive scale of operation necessary to build out something like their education program would take trillions of dollars in today’s economy. If we spent a third of our national GDP trying to build something equivalent on our own terms, we might catch up to with where Google is today in 10 years or so, and we’d have to fund it entirely publicly, because no one in their right mind is going to invest in a private competitor that’s primary use case is a market 1/10th the size of the US.
Is it doable? Yes. Is it cheap, easy, or fast? Absolutely not. Is it worth it? Maybe??? Can we maybe cut a deal with the EU and their new data sovereignty initiative and make it happen a bit faster and cheaper? Yeah, that might work.
I’m not so sure that monetary figure is actually that vast. Breaking contracts? Yeah, I would imagine there would be a financial penalty for that.
https://lemmy.ca/u/loremnop This is why I am starting a venture on Linux and FOSS (free & open source software). I’m also in Nova Scotia, and this is where I’ll be based. At least for now. I also used Linux in the early 2000s, and it’s time it becomes normalized. Even back then it was workable, as your experience demonstrates, and now there are several beginner friendly distros.
At the new Halifax Repair Cafés, I’m known as the Linux Lady. The next one is Sept 20th at Keshen Goodman Library, from 10AM to 2PM.
I think it’s a bigger commitment than a lot of tech people like to think it is, and I say that as someone who has worked in IT for over 20 years now. Most lay people have no idea just how big the educational technology ecosystem really is. There’s a patchwork of sometimes questionably maintained FLOSS tools that can kind-of-almost work for some things if you are willing to roll your own plugins and patches, but it takes a major org like Canonical who supports Ubuntu or something equivalent to extend and maintain even the basics. It’s not the wild west out here anymore, and major companies and government departments aren’t willing to spend a lot of time and money exploring options or extend some patience while we work out the bugs. We need paid professionals building extensive platforms, and that means either we roll our own tech behemoths the way China did (unlikely) or we admit we need to set up a crown corp and pay for it out of the public purse, because again, no one on earth is going to invest in sovereign Canadian goods when you can make 10x the profit south of the border.
