School Kids Get Virtual Web Lockers 178
Lucas123 writes "Seventh and eighth graders in Tulsa, Oklahoma not only get tablet PCs at the beginning of the school year, but they are now issued 100MB of storage through a hosted school 'Web Locker' system. The Web lockers also include chat, calendaring, and collaboration capabilities, but school administrators can also monitor and track all files uploaded to the system, and lock out individuals for misuse."
Useless... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Useless... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most kids have thumb drives; why would they want to use 100MB of disk space that can be spied on?
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"But pretty much every computer on a private network is monitored, This isn't really a new "feature" so much as a continuation of existing procedure."
It depends on where you work. We don't monitor anything where I work - anyone stupid enough to try that would be caught out quickly enough. Its expected that people (both men and women) will hit a few porn sites every now and then. Big deal ... just don't download tons of porn all at once and swallow up all the bandwidth while everyone else is trying to wor
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"So what about all the violent images on the web? I suppose there's no point in trying to protect kids from that either?"
1. They see a lot more violence, a lot more realistically portrayed, on TV. TV has been around a LOT longer. The motivation of people arguing for net censorship is self-serving and hypocritical, because they don't want to deprive themselves of their TV violence.
2. Your argument is a fallacy - it posits an either-or situation, which is not the case here.
3. Kids are more likely to fi
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In the past, parents let their children read all kinds of books. Horror stories, romances, hell, even the bible includes sex, rape and murder. This stuff is NORMAL for a child to see and experience. Hell, I was reading Steven king at the age of 10. A pannel member at a games development company stated that he read the exorcist at about the same age.
As far as I can see, there is little to no difference between what children see now and what they saw in the past. The only difference is that par
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There certainly have been books whose text contain those things for a long time, but that's not quite the same as
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Yes. Instead of keeping it from them, sit down with them and find out what they're looking at. Most of it isn't that bad.
Its like one of my sisters - she was always complaining that her son and his friend were always surfing asian porn sites.
Years later, shes saying "Thank god they're just surfing asian porn sites."
As far as she's concerned, as long as there's no sign they're "getting into" gay porn, she doesn't care.
(note to self - must plant gay porn on nephew's computer :-)
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And if you look at the statistics, Japan, a country that is more open about sex to the point that they have computer games where you stalk and rape women, has a far lower amount of sex crime than the US.
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Since when does porn cause rape? TV shows that depict rape sound a more likely cause. Cultural values that promote inequality between men and women sound more likely. Speaking of which, when is the US going to finally declare that men and women are equal?
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Groups of people, as
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The ERA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendmen t [wikipedia.org] would fix that. For 35 years, its been before congress, and they continually refuse to ratify it. Can't expect too much from an old boys club.
Re:Useless... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey!
Violence is Gods work! Didn't you ever read the old testament??!?!?!?
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Yeah but the sex was almost always in the context of bad and sinful whereas the violence was almost always viewed in a favorable light by God.
Hrm... (Score:2)
Problem: once they provide virtual lockers, they will likely remove access to USB ports to plug in thumb drives. Can't do that now because the kids actually need access to them. And even with access to a USB port, rebooting to peanut linux probably isn't a good solution either—talk about attracting attention. In my grade/jr high/high school, when we had access to a computer, rebooting was not allowed (nor was opening applications other than the one we were supposed to be using).
I think the proper a
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In a few years all the kids will have laptops. Heck, they don't need the school system for chat, im, videos, email, sms, web surfing and posting, music, etc - they just need a recent cell phone.
And you can be sure that cell phone has a lot more than a measly 100 megs.
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What you say is too true and so like government. Hey kid, I see you have an 8GB iPhone there with full web and email capabilities. We're introducing this great new service at school you should get familiar with. It's a whole 100 megabytes of teacher-monitored space hosted on our own servers, admin'd by our resident IT and security expert—your very own computer teacher! Hey, where are you going?
You gotta love it when the state gets involved in stuff like this. It's so adorable!
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riiight ... teach the kids to be good little sheeples now.
Heck, the kids cell phones probably have more data storage than they're given on this "service". All they need to trade files is a transfer cable (which mine came with).
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It's not about teaching the kids to be sheeples, it is about making the sysadmin's life easier. I remember when I was in school and wreaking havoc on the network, a policy was put into place and I was suddenly in trouble. Most of the other kids stopped doing what they were doing because of this policy. I did not, and ended up being an un-official assistant to the sysadmin in my senior
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So explain how all this requires them to monitor chat conversations.
It doesn't.
Its a "we will be nosy because we can" thing.
What are they going to do when kids routinely set up their own encrypted AlterNets in a few years?
Right - nothing. Because they won't be able to do squat.
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Unless they can't access gmail from school.
100 mB virtual lockers? What are they, zip drives from 1995? 2 gig flash drives are $20 [circuitcity.com]. Why the measly 100 megs?
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It's always been that way. (Score:2)
Cute. So the other 99.99% (don't question the number) of 8th graders who don't have an 'accessory gmail account' are worthless/sub par? We're in for a grim future then :)
That's nothing new, really. I think 99.99 percent is probably a stretch, but out of any 100 randomly selected children, I strongly suspect that 90 will live their entire lives completely at the whims of various higher authorities, never bothering to seriously challenge or question them. That's not really a commentary on our society in particular as much as it is human nature in general; I suspect you could go back 2000 years and see basically the same things.
Mod Parent Funny....please? (Score:2)
Incentive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Incentive? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Incentive? (Score:5, Funny)
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It's not that bad as long as you ask questions that only pertain to the doilies and don't bother to open the box or measure the contents. If you do that, you might, just might manage to get to second base or destroy the entirety of whatever continent your on.
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Unlik
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Gee, I guess you didn't RTFA. There is no integration for grading, etc., yet. As for submitting assignments, the teacher has a 1-gig allotment.
The way to take this system out quickly is for a bunch of kids to all start spreading stories about one or two teachers using the chat function. You know its going to happen. A few kids will post that "Mr. Brown" keeps asking them to spend extra time with him after school doing research and
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The big difference being that the school didn't have and didn't exercise a right to read through everything written on school paper. Your love poems to the girl two rows over, and which you kept at home, were kept safe, not only from her and other schoolmates, but from the teachers too. The papers they got to see, they got to see because you handed them over, not because they
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The surveillanced world is coming, just not under our watch because we know how the internet came about and what happened with uncontrolled surveillance by government agencies, just because we value our privacy. If you raise the kids nowadays that surveillance is normal and ch
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And teach my kids that it's perfectly fine to have secrets and that no thoughts are illegal, despite what certain people claim. And if there's something they think I should know but they don't want to tell me, they're better off telling me anyhow, or things will just be much worse when I find out. But they have a right to privacy -- from me, from teachers, from governments, from lovers and from god herself. If they want to lock their doors, write secre
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Of course any technically clueful student will have a thumb drive, unofficial email and IM accounts, and lots of other places to stash/do stuff they don't want teachers and parents to know about. (Though not all students are technically clueful, and the school will try to prevent such unmonitored activity.) But all the stuff they're supposed to be doing will li
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I think the problem is it can be both for different people, or even the same person in different circumstances.
I'm horrible at handwriting, I hate doing it, and would have done a lot better in school had I typed everything, been able to copy/paste and arbitrarily reformat documents post-writing,
Re:Incentive? (Score:5, Insightful)
This big brother paranoia is going through the roof on
Some advantages:
- Local storage means much faster access times than external provider
- School bears responsibility for system upkeep - if it fails, you have a legitimate reason to not produce your homework or project that was stored or submitted there.
- System can be integrated with class notes and announcements, and the calendar can be used as school agenda - student logs in, sees the courses he's taking, and sees the homework assigned to him in each course.
- With login information tied to student IDs, it is much easier to track assignments and work going through the system for administration and teachers, you don't need to wonder who submitted the work coming from email s3xyb4b3@gmail.com.
And YES, you will get in trouble if you download pr0n or pirate music using the system... Just like you would at your workplace for doing the same thing using the corporate system. If you want to send something without being monitored, don't use the school system for that particular message, just as you wouldn't use your work email unless you expect it to be monitored by your employer.
It's very nice more schools are accepting the high-tech way of doing work. Not only it makes managing assignments much easier (meaning teachers can spend more time TEACHING and less time going through homework), but it trains children to real life, where high-tech work has already became a standard.
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That's exactly why the subject of your post is "Re: Incentive?". They want it to be for everything, but that would require a carrot.
What do you mean "for fr
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Given that it is a private, Catholic school, they don't have to justify opening your real locker either.
Wow. You know, it's possible you're right -- but even if you are, you're still a fool for thinking that clearl
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Please do explain. How is it going to be easier managing assignments? Whether an essay is submitted on paper or as a
but it trai
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I use my corporate email for work-related communication only. For everything else, I use one of several external accounts based on importance and probability of getting spam.
This big brother paranoia is going through the roof on
As soon as Big Brother shows some good faith, I'll take off my beanie. Until then...
Local storage means much faster access times than external provider
You haven't used a school comput
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what do you think, for heaven's sake (Score:2)
I'm sure they're not just providing it for
Product Placement (Score:5, Insightful)
And, of course, a steady supply of advertising and "product placement".
That's quite the story write-up, almost as if done by a PR writer...
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Ummm...where in TFA (or anywhere else, for that matter) do you see advertising mentioned?
I know the tin-foil-hat mentality is rampant here on slashdot, but please, at least try to have a bit of concrete (no, anecdotal doesn't count) evidence before you go around slinging accusations.
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I don't see any hint of of this on Networld's School Web Lockers [schoolweblockers.com] home page. What I do is a link to to an add-free online demo, using the simplest of text and calendar displays.
They will WANT the control (Score:2)
because it seemed easier
because it seemed faster
because it seemed safer
because I was afraid
because I thought I had to
because it was more expensive if I didn't let them do it
becuase it wasn't worth fighting any more for freedom
because if I refused, the terrorists would win
because everyone else was doing it
a system like this- services for kids in school seems simple, seems good - but it is a wolf in sheeps clothing. These students are being taught to use a
Re:They will WANT the control - "OMG SHEEPLE!111" (Score:2)
THE SCUMBAGS.
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Re:They will WANT the control (Score:5, Insightful)
Grow up. Not everything is Big Brother.
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Ok, ask some teachers if they would want a system like this if it didn't come with the ability to snoop on students. I dare you to ask.
I have teachers in my family, and can assure you that very few, if any, teachers want more technical hoops to jump through, more training classes, and more possible points of failure, even if it adds abilities they didn't have before. They're unde
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Would you still want it if it requires not only you and fellow teachers learn how to use the system, but also teach the students how to use it and help them when they can't, whether it is for technical or wetware reasons? And potentially (which is an euphemism for "certainly") be out of the water when the system goes down, and you lose access to not only a single paper, but all of them, including your own work? When you then have to make up the lost time on your own copiou
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If you asked me if I would use such a system, I might, but I probably wouldn't. I have a system that works (i.e. I can email students, post assignments online, &c.), and, unless the system worked very well, I probably wouldn't have much used for it. A system like the one proposed is not a panacea -- it is a tool, and,
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I don't need to. I wrote one for the LA county school system several years ago, and it didn't come with the ability to snoop on students. It was compiled, so please don't waste my time informing me about the black-suit Russian commandos that came in behind me and rewrote my code to turn it into SkyNet. I mean, seriously, do you ask whether the new Xerox machine has secr
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"Kid Nation" is a fantasy.
Scripted and monitored by adults behind the scenes.
The classroom is a supervised environment precisely because kids don't have the experience or the maturity needed to make the right decisions in an unsupervised environment.
ComputerWorld Shill (Score:4, Informative)
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Actually, this very activity - shilling stories to blogs as a part of a calculated advertising / PR campaign - would make an excellent Slashdot story itself!
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You're right! I'm going to write something up in my blog and then submit it!
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Websters: "to act as a spokesperson or promoter"
Wikipedia: "A shill is an associate of a person selling a good or service, who pretends no association and assumes the air of an enthusiastic customer." There are man
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I don't understand (Score:2)
So if Taco Bell is giving away free tacos, and your mom drives down there and gets you some, that's OK. But if the guy from Taco Bell drives right up to your house and hands them to you, that's an evil marketing ploy because he's just a shill.
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You have the "what" in your comment, but you certainly don't have the "why should I give a crap" covered.
So basically... (Score:2)
Now, if the lockers were encrypted with TRUECRYPT (and YOU had the key in USB or something), now THAT'd be something.
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Of course, if the kids DID encrypt their files before uploading, they'd have all those snoopy people wanting to know what sort of terr'rist crap they were into.
If the security is as poor as one system I got into a few years ago (3 attempts to get the default new user password, 1 to get the current school admin password - it was too easy to call it "hacking") ...
No system is safe from a large group of intelligent, motivated monkeys.
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How many megabytes? (Score:5, Informative)
School admin here. This quote is just laughable. Granted, up until last year, I had my students set at 100 MB apiece. Looking at the quota log, most students could get along just fine with 25 MB, although those who have more usually just have too many pictures saved up.
But, as soon as we started up doing a multimedia class last year using PhotoShop and Movie Maker, 100 MB was laughable. Some PS projects alone were 60-70 MB, and editing raw video requires ~200 MB per minute of video data. I upped these kids to 300 MB, and when they worked on videos, it was in a separate lab that let students save their data to the hard drives.
I can understand the desire to have portability for students and staff, but that's what thumb drives are for. Besides, there are a number of families who still do not have online access yet.
When I were a lad (Score:3, Interesting)
The frustration of never a moments peace because we could read the books on the bus or train and be briefed ready to start our homework sooner, leaving more spare time that had to be filled with 'leisure activities - or - worse yet - the hassle of arranging to meet your friends and actually see them in person - heck sometimes we even shared a meal or some sodas in a local park - OUTDOORS - whole we worked together on projects!
At the moment it's a real pain when I have to visit my 7-year-old son's school to have him show me through his project books and explain what he has been working on. Soon I may be able to login to his folder, have a quick browse and tick a box.
Yay progress!
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Well, ironically if you live in a third world country, it would be easier to use the laptop outdoors as the OLPC black&white screen is much easier to read outdoors than traditionnal LCD screens (and it has a higher resolution), too bad normal laptop builders have more or less stopped inovating (the flash disk being the only exception).
New? Really? (Score:2)
I've used Class Fronter [fronter.com] since around 2004. Thats...uhm...*counts on fingers*..for three years.
Class Fronter (or fronter in shorthand) has file uploading space. It got hand-in folders which blocks uploads after a specific date. It got chat. It got games. It got integrated multiple-choice tests. In short; it's a locker with some damn nice features. So why the heck is this on slashdot? I mean, Learning Management Systems, or a "Locker" is nothing new at all. It is at least 10 years old I guess.
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Why? Because its, ummm, because ... ummm I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uhmmm, some people out there in our nation don't have maps and uh, I believe that our, I, education like such as uh, South Africa, and uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uhhh, our education over here in the US should help the US, uh, should help South Africa, it should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future, for the child
The Tablet PCs seem to be much more notable to me (Score:2, Interesting)
Tablet PCs start around a grand, 100MB of storage is pennies
Tablet PCs allow students to use computers productively (and more easily) in all classes, 100 MB of storage provides ???
Tablet PCs have (most likely) at least 40,000 MB of storage, 100 MB of storage has 100 MB of storage...
I for one think that if teachers are taught to use the tablets effectively, they can be a boon for education, as opposed to laptops, which I find to be virtually useless in most classroom environments in current usage scenari
A digital locker you can't own but must have. (Score:4, Interesting)
This brings us one step further to losing your right to read [gnu.org]. All they need to do is fill it with non free textbooks and tell you not to share them. If there's something everyone needs, you don't need to put it in a locker. A private space for students and computer access would be nice, but not if it's just another tool of control. Requiring the use of non free software is just the first part of that control and it's funny that one of the reasons given was the lack of reliability of the old non free software. The web already offers ways to share calendars, movies and the rest outside the control of the school.
It's gonna be used for... (Score:2)
At least, that's pretty much what I did with my 200k of high school provided server storage back
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We'd make the printer terminal sing too. Fun times.
ehh (Score:2, Insightful)
But the "Locker" thing... I've seen plenty of solutions like this. All have either received negative or lukewarm reviews by students (including me). WebCT and Blackboard are the only two I can think of off-hand.
Really, what it comes down to is that whatever content is posted on these portals (calling a spade a spade) is owned by the school district. If teachers and students post their work on the portal, the schoo
School deploys nfs with quota (Score:4, Insightful)
More in-depth reporting on this amazing and lightning-paced story, as it develops!
Wow, somebody got paid for this, as an innovative product. People's tax money was spent on a "technology" for storing files on a remote server. Does anyone else feel a feint impulse to just give up, turn evil, and start fleecing suckers like this? They're out there, and they're waving their money around, jumping up and down, yelling, "Do me! Do meeeeee!!"
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Just paid? Try "paid a shitload". Educational contracts are highly lucrative because a.) the librarian who managed the computers before doesn't know her ass from her elbow and is easily wowed by salesmen b.) it's just taxpayer money anyways.
Which is why you have a retarded limit like 100mb.
How is this even slightly news? (Score:2)
We also had a messaging module, installations of phpBB and MediaWiki, electronic assignment submission, on-line marks entry for the lecturers and a raft of other feature
Finally! (Score:3, Funny)
Calling it a "virtual locker" proves you're dumb. (Score:3, Funny)
It's a collaboration suite.
Uh, isn't this just called a 'home directory'?? (Score:2)
I saw nothing in TFA that distinguishes this from normal home dir usage. Did I miss something?
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(This is, of course, a lie: you're not at all on par with them, since they're usually funny. But, the joke only works if I parrot you.)
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Since it's apparent that a larger amount of sides is always beneficial (the ability of a square to roll is obviously much wo
Re:I'll file for a patent on polygon (Score:2)
This enhancement may be done to polygonal wheels that have any number of sides.