Shambles, But Make It Digital

I don’t think this is unique to education. I see it at work in media CMSes and other tools, and whenever I try to contact the NHS. The problem, I would guess, is who decides whether to buy a piece of software: typically not employee users, let alone external ones. Instead, senior managers who never use the tool themselves, or interact with customers, buy it based on claimed benefits—particularly, how much it saves on staffing or staff time. Until it breaks so badly you lose business—say a restaurant booking tool that doesn’t record reservations—there’s no incentive to replace it.

(apologies for the double post – please do delete the previous as I fluffed the html formatting)

Perhaps an answer may lie in this thought:

it seems that one of the things about treating something as a business is that the primary (and, arguably, only) priority becomes “making money”, with “providing goods and/or services” being merely the means to that end (and, quite possibly, a means which – should it prove inefficient and unnecessary – may be dispensed with)

That is to say, commodification inherently leads to exploitation as profit is more important than providing commodities.

(c.f. the various digital entertainment industries moving towards business models which prioritise maximums extraction from customers over convenience, value, etc.)

It’s not only happening in education, but it might be particularly bad in education. Four kids here, and they’ve all passed through multiple schools. And the online experiences have been wildly various but have mostly ranged from mediocre through bad to horrible and destructive.

We’ve had pretty much exactly the experiences you describe, plus some additional awfulness — like the online course that kept mis-grading my son’s submissions, and where the human in the loop agreed that it was graded wrong but wouldn’t (probably couldn’t) change the grades.

Why education should be particularly bad in this regard I don’t know. But it kinda seems to be.

Doug M.

Enshittification?

Are there free software projects that address this problem?

The real solution would probably be to empower users to perform the selection and require fixes and upgrades.

I guess this makes me feel slightly better about the system we use here where I teach (which, I think, is a modified version of Blackboard, though I’m not 100% sure.) It’s clunky and not pretty, but… it does all the things you mention tolerably well. Some things are annoying (I have small sections as well as a larger lecture, but the “notice” feature doesn’t let me send emails to just certain sections, for example) but it mostly works. It’s actually generally worse than the somewhat similar systems I used back when I used to teach at Penn, 7 years ago, so some such things that work tolerably, if not great, have been around for a while.
(We, and many Australian universities, do use some awful software designed by Elsivar that turns our “research outputs” into awful, ugly, but bureaucratically accepted faculty web pages, but I mostly try to not look at those. They are not needed day-to-day.)

I’ll also say I’ve mostly been pleasantly surprised with the software that the Australian government uses for taxes, medicare and some other things. To my mind, at least, it’s fairly user-friendly (though maybe I’m just starting with the very low standard of interacting the the IRS in the US), “clean”, and not hard to access.

This shouldn’t make you feel better. Maybe it should make you feel worse! But, it does seem that some even not that impressive institutions can get and use at least pretty okay software.

My sense is that while the medium and mode have changed, people had an incentive to half-ass things in the past, half-ass things in the present, and will half-ass things in the future. So while it may be annoying to click through 3 links that may or may not work to get to some flier that doesn’t bother to actually say what time my kid’s event actually starts, presumably 25 years ago that would have (maybe) come home as a flier in the backpack missing the same information.

I have a child in early elementary school. There are approximately a dozen platforms in use: for aftercare communications, school lunch, grades, two for math homework, one for language arts; plus assignments in e.g. google slides. Then there is the parents’ WhatsApp chat group, full of very nice people who are usually confused and frustrated. It never stops.

The school software is junk and is sometimes downright invasive: it wants access to the computer’s camera, and in the case of school-sanctioned games, they want money—actual dollars!—for plus ups. I find it exploitative and enraging. Fortunately, my child is very reasonable when we say we’re not paying for that stuff.

I assume these apps come from vendors who are friendly with the administration and maybe the state I live in. Once something is implemented, it can stay in the budget and be accounted for forever. I wish there were the slightest bit of quality control, and I wish it didn’t have to be a political fight to rationalize schoolwork and communications.

The solution is strict liability for software developers (no more “this product is sold with no warranty or representation of suitability for any particular purpose”). You have to be able to show that you made a good-faith effort to make it work, and that you respond to reports that it doesn’t, or the State takes all of your money and gives it to the people you fucked over.

Because the problem is for-profit software development, the resulting pressure to be “first to market.” Being “first to market” with something that doesn’t work needs to be punished, not rewarded.

Other commenters make very good points about market and organisation level dynamics which lead to this issue. At a higher level, I think this is an outcome of the piecemeal privatisation of public services – which is itself arguably a second phase of the waves of privatisation that have been eroding the UK’s public infrastructure for decades.

The piecemeal approach is a reaction to previous models of IT outsourcing which saw central government sell off public sector computing infrastructure to huge multinational providers, then pay those providers for the privilege of using the expropriated assets. The government’s predictable reaction to this was not less privatisation but more – divide up public services into tiny slices and dish them out to a set of (at least nominally) competing firms, and hope that the invisible hand disciplines the capitalists into providing better quality services for cheap. Well, we all know how that’s going.

The only way out of this mess is to exorcise the Thatcherite vampires who have had their fangs in our public services for far too long. Unfortunately, the current ruling party seems to exist largely as a vehicle for private interests, so I’m not holding my breath for a legislative solution.

the article linked by Dan Weiskopf @ #8 tells a great deal of this story. however the real issue is a disinvestment in the labor of education. you could have a system where you just type up (for example) the essay you need and e-mail it to the professor, who reads it and grades it. but that requires the school to pay the professor to take some time with their e-mail, to give the professor the leeway to let them decide which submissions are valid, and so on. and perhaps a few bad actors would fall through the cracks. but at least you could copy and paste your work from one to another.

the profit motive is even more broadly at work as Dan Strong points out at #17. the professor could obtain course materials in easily accessible, searchable, copyable and transmissible formats, and send them to the class by e-mail, and they could read it and copy/paste it when and how they liked. but that requires the people producing the materials to understand that perhaps a student might send some of that to a friend when trying to learn, without paying them extra. this would be fine if the people producing the materials were paid to produce them to be used freely in education. but you don’t make millionaires into billionaires by doing that. you only make educated, happy students and teachers. the nightmare of the privatizer

Two extremely relevant concepts:
“Captive clienteles,” which are described in Edgar Friedenberg’s book The Disposal of Liberty and Other Industrial Wastes. The gist of the idea, updated for the digital age, is that most on-the-job productivity software is designed by stovepiped R&D bureaucracies for sale to the stovepiped IT departments of other corporations, and the latter acquire it for use for workers whose feedback is irrelevant because they have no choice but to use it or quit.
“Enshittification,” a concept developed by Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron in their blogs.
I tied the two concepts together here: https://c4ss.org/content/59818
Somebody noted years ago — I forget who — that the quality of work people could perform at home on their own open-source, browser-based or desktop software was orders of magnitude using the software tools supplied by their employer.

Came here to link Ed Zitron’s blog, https://www.wheresyoured.at/ which multiole people have already. It’s an extension of the general ‘enshittification’ process and the rot economy.

Exponentially growing levels of companies trying to squeeze profits from inserting their own SAAS into ever more parts of the business processes that the customer needs. I have run into SAAS companies that integrate into other companies’ SAAS offerings.

And EVERYTHING runs on the basis of ‘Move fast and break things’

Seeing the comment by Sandwichman: oh yes, editorial manuscript management software is a perfect example of the problem. I was once corresponding author for a manuscript with more than sixty files, most of them figures. (It was a taxonomic monograph of a genus with tens of species, and each species needed a ‘plate’, i.e., a large figure illustrating it, and bundles of 2-4 species each had a map showing their distributions. That adds up.)

The main manuscript file is required to be the first in order, or you can’t proceed. I had to change something, so delete the main file, upload the updated one, so it is now last in order because it is the most recently uploaded. This then meant going through over sixty drop-down menus, one for each file, adjusting them individually to “you are now #11 instead of #10”, “you are now #12 instead of #11”, and so on.

A competing software lets the user drag files up and down to change order, so this could have been done in two seconds, tops. And just as an aside, an even smarter software could automatically put the main manuscript file first in order the moment the submitter flags it as such. But the problem is that journals find it difficult and disruptive to migrate from one system to another, and the problem is the manuscript submitter’s, not the editor-in-chief’s, and much less the developer’s, so…

It’s not worth overthinking this. This is the first wave of enshittificaiton where software companies screw over the end users. I think the argument that the capitalistic incentives (market + network effects + asymmetrical information) inevitably lead to this are pretty strong. Pretty soon they will screw over the middlemen (the institutions that purchase the software). And then we are back to the Stone Age, but with really bad software that we have to use. Cuneiform tablets would be more efficient (I know, Bronze Age).

These rules for living might be relevant:

Tech eventually ruins everything it touches
Tech just wants to put you out of work and appropriate your salary
In Silicon Valley, tech monetizes YOU!

At many British universities you would not be permitted, as a teacher, to deviate from the approved system in this way. Using something like Blackboard is mandatory. There are no opt-outs.

That turned out to be so for me, too! I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this point, but this is still so strange and stupid to me, and counter to what was the case everywhere I taught in the US, that it’s sometimes hard for me to remember. I sometimes make the mistake of asking why something like this must be done, but do these days mostly just try to remind myself that it won’t help me, I won’t get a real answer (other than “that’s what the rules are” or “it’s important that everything is done the same way”, with no explanation as to why that’s important), and that it will do no good to push. So, I try to teach myself acceptance, even though the whole thing is dumb.

In regards to the simpler means of email for collecting work and communicating, I believe this might technically be a regulatory issue. Email is by nature insecure and poses risks, at least in the US, in regards to privacy. It strikes me that much of the egregious software in education is generated to assuage liability woes of the institutions (for instance the wave of “accessibility” vapor-ware hitting the scene). It’s almost as if there’s a collusion between regulatory bodies and industry to shake down public institutions or something.

It’s important not to underestimate the role of simple incompetence, a horse that is always limping.

For example, Elsevier’s (I think) journal management system requires a separate login and password for every journal, when they could have set up a single login for all their publications. And, the way they’ve set it up means you can’t easily use a password manager. I don’t think there’s any secret plan here, just sloppiness.

Another example, not primarily technical. The Springer publications have started aggressively “unsubmitting” articles because of minor deviations from their formatting rules, which also differ from journal to journal. That’s in part because the job has been handed off to admin staff who have no idea what matters and what doesn’t. In the short run this saves work for the editors, but eventually authors get sick of it and either attempt end-runs, approaching the editors directly, or just go elsewhere.

The flip side of this problem is that when software is really good (thing Apple, Microsoft, Google et al) ….it often becomes very dominant to the point where the next thing you know is regulators are howling about monopoly power and walled gardens and looking for ways to break it up.

Unfortunately for us poor users you’re left with being either exploited by monopolists or being exploited by incompetence…..the choice isn’t even yours.

as a techie so old as to be nearly ex, I am repeatedly bewildered that the common systems seem to be much worse than “SVN with directory structure and per-directory access” plus “submit in Markdown or maybe HTML” would be. And I would expect LaTeX’s fiddliness to be unmatched, but Alex SL makes me wonder.

Some of it is how much some people hate hate hate even looking at plaintext…. anything. This feels like we solved it for HTML and surely we could manage for other things?… I don’t know. I don’t know why public key cryptography never took off either. People complained about having two passwords and look how many we have to have now.

This has been an on-going problem in software engineering for decades. Pioneering software engineer Brian Kernighan (yes, the one who co-wrote the C book):

The interesting, sorry, I shouldn’t be saying “interesting” – the areas that are difficult are only two: one that it’s too hard to write programs that work, and the other that it’s too hard to use computers. So if you want things to work on, these are two that you could try. – Brian Kernighan interview, July 2000

And this was true, 25 years before that interview, and it is still true, nearly 25 years later. Web applications are what we used to call “teleprocessing” applications, and those have always been difficult – there are multiple systems and many layers of software involved. There are solutions, but they involve commitment, more staff, and more work, and so they aren’t implemented. Add to that the contempt that managers and executives have for the line developers and the “folk art” status of software development – these days many people know how to solve small problems, and so think large problems are easy – and a lot of web apps are of low quality.