Notices by Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿 (lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz)

My wife is working from home, and I'm listening to her and her colleagues having an online meeting via MS Teams - everything is "Teams" this or "Teams" that. 🤢 🤮 Poor folks being forced by their *gov't funded institution* to contend with such rubbish, poorly conceived, elitist (overpriced) digital technology, created by such an unworthy & psychotic entity (the Microsoft Corporation).

@captainepoch Yeah, I agree re Slack (I wrote this: https://davelane.nz/notslack) - but, to be fair, Slack doesn't have that limitation if you're paying for it (a similar amount to what our gov't is paying MIcrosoft for MSO 365, probably). In any case, anyone paying either vendor is getting ripped off in more than one way.

The IT Professionals institute has been wringing its hands: https://www.digitalequity.nz/blog/windows-10-desupport-who-will-be-impacted and pleading with Microsoft to come up with a less exclusionary process. Of course, Microsoft couldn't care less. The problem is that our national edtech system is conceptually flawed from the start & needs a fundamentally different approach. Dependence on 2 US corporations (neither known for honest dealings or 'not being evil') for *all* our schools most basic edtech is ridiculous. So, what approach?
2/n

Unbeknownst to anyone with decision-making power in the MinOfEd, with a bit of leadership & vision, we could create a vastly better edtech landscape for Aotearoa *in* Aotearoa, without any dependence on foreign tech corporations whatsoever. But, yeah, the 'leadership & vision' part is missing entirely. Seems to me, we need a mandate for the MinOfEd to realise that putting all our eggs in those two very precarious MS & GOOG baskets is/was a mistake & they need to invest in a '#ThirdWay'.

3/n

Over the coming weeks, I'm going to start explaining what I think that #ThirdWay should look like, because I don't think we can afford, as a nation, to continue with the duopoly to which the MinOfEd has shackled us.

For the curious, here's a starting point: https://davelane.nz/openschools - in addition to an explainer video, there's an entire book (available for download as a PDF) on there, which explains that better way.

4/n

The #edtech status quo in Aotearoa has huge inertia & plenty of tech support staff who mostly have very narrow expertise, limited to those two US corporate monocultures and a smattering of other things around the edges. So whatever transition is proposed needs to be gradual & carefully-managed. Ultimately, a transition to a #ThirdWay will be mostly political & there'll be a stiff opposition to it from the many vested interests involved. We need to agree the status quo is not acceptable.

5/n

I think we'd all benefit in many ways from an edtech #ThirdWay that is fully run by NZ businesses competing to offer services with a common set of open (#libre) platforms that give us, as a country, the ability to set our pedagogical & practical tech direction. If you want to create tech-savvy kiwi kids, the best way is to give them real experience with open tech, without glass ceilings or steel floors.

I'm certain it would, post transition, cost us all less & offer us far more.

6/n

At the very least, a #ThirdWay would give us a fighting chance of arresting the onslaught of generative LLMs into every aspect of our digital existences. That's in direct opposition to, say, Microsoft, who've been working with the MinOfEd for years for ways to shoehorn 'AI' into every aspect of the curriculum: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/492898/documents-expose-microsoft-s-relationship-with-nz-education-and-hopes-for-ai-in-schools

7/n

Folks in NZ are starting to realise the implications of the impending EOL of Microsoft Windows 10 for our education system. In its finite wisdom, our MinOfEd has effectively locked all schools into either the use of MS Windows or Google ChromeOS. Both have fundamental issues like endless license hassles, EOLing OSs, ending support for Window or ChromeOS on specific computer models, etc. And that doesn't even start to talk about digital colonisation & sovereignty (see https://davelane.nz/explainer-digitech-risks-school-boards) 1/n

Nice to see these (thanks for the tip @thelinuxEXP!) - https://unite.un.org/news/osi-first-endorse-united-nations-open-source-principles and https://news.itsfoss.com/un-ditches-google-form/

@lxo ooo, nice quote - yes, I remember seeing Allison talking about this stuff around that time - he's the real deal.

Huh - what do you know? https://redis.io/blog/agplv3/ - turns out that when a software category is dominated by a #libre option (e.g. mobile operating systems, database & blog engines, and now value stores/caching systems), nothing proprietary can compete. And the rest of the world benefits from it. Imagine that.

@lucasmz yes - that's true - they're some proprietary binary blobs for drivers (like GSM and a few other specialised things, like VoWifi)... so there's no time for complacency. We need to keep up the pressure.

Whelp, the water's pretty high out there. We're on the way towards having a rather large lake across the road.

This is what home be like (after wild weather walkies)...

Australians, please review! https://yewtu.be/watch?v=zXHq04W0kBs or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXHq04W0kBs

So, this is kinda huge: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0 This is (last I checked) the guy with 100 million YouTube subscribers... switching to Linux (Mint) with a lot of useful commentary and some choice words for Microsoft and Windows. This could be a bit of a big deal.

@craftygardennz one of the most worthy targets is surely our use of (total dependence on) US-owned IT services and systems... and reversing the historical shunning of domestic alternatives.

@apropos @Suiseiseki seems to me that either could be forked pretty trivially if the US was being boycotted. Sure, the original devs wouldn't be as likely working on it, but let's not forget that Torvalds is Finnish even if he's been in the US for many years.

It'll be funny if, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Microsoft's founding (not something to celebrate in my opinion, of course), Trump's tariffs could cause people to choose non-US-owned technologies, i.e. Linux. I'd be ok with that.