Posted by ceejayoz 2 hours ago
It's almost always possible to do worse.
If they could get better results with off-the-shelf tools, I'm pretty sure they would.
(Not 100% sure. Some non-profit charters pay a for-profit management company, which suggests commercial software, where the charter, management company, and software provider are all owned by the same person. They may prefer to make more money than improve student grades.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
When I hear a giant company say that modifying some of its software is impossible I always think about that IE and laugh.
Profited very handsomely from his lies.
I added a custom search engine entry to firefox that does this, made it the default, and haven't seen an AI summary from Google since I did that.
All those kids will get used to whatever other search they can use.
I guess the point here is that Google thinks schools need to start using AI, and that all this "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense.
If by "interesting" you mean "abusive and coercive."
> I guess the point here is that Google thinks schools need to start using AI, and that all this "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense.
Explain that more please: whose talk is "nonsense"? Google's? Parents'? Schools'?
'Cause it sounds Google is saying this:
> You silly parents and educators, you thought you set educational policy for your students? No, we actually do. Your choices will conform to our business plans of the moment, or we will make your life so painful and difficult that you will "consent" to our demands.
> Did we mention our motto is "don't be evil"? We live our values every day.
More generously, it seems like Google just doesn't see a justification for maintaining an AI-free search platform alongside their AI-integrated vision for search.
For a smaller vendor in a competitive market, this decision wouldn't read like coercion. It would just be a roadmap statement that might draw some customers in and drive some towards competitors. You would expect a business to be able to make that kind of decision (a prima facie reasonable one) about how they'll invest in their products and the support infrastructure that surrounds them.
What this story really exposes is how dependent schools have been made on Google specifically and how the idea of independently making choices against their roadmap feels infeasible. It feels like a monopoly to administrators and the public even if it isn't formally marked as such by regulatory agencies.
That itself is worth more people thinking about.
This is attempted coercion, plain and simple.
There are a host of other search engines. I use search.brave.com myself (after leta.mullvad.com was decommissioned).
Students will learn about other search engines, and about how corporations are not your friends. Both good lessons to learn.
We could do much better with access to online libraries (which don't exist, apart from the very limited sample from these books accessible using Wikipedia).
Current (blogs and articles and forums) online resources provide information at a rate book search just can't provide.
Trillions and trillions of dollars of technology later, and the best we can do now is fly by and wave.
This is along the lines of “for responsible parenting, never let your kids out of sight”.
Breaking stuff sometimes is a way to learn "don't break that".
Broken children can be tough to fix.
A good deal of research shows that most learning happens when you recognize and back off from an incorrect solution on your own, without outside guidance. So, the key to a good learning environment is setting up scenarios where the backround information is present, and answers aren't out of reach, but there's a bit of struggle to find them.
This is also how you learn to learn, and develop grit. Grit is one of the best predictors of success.
Technology that gives answers or guides heavily is harmful to the learning process.
Centrally forcing schools to do what is good for corporation is not experimentation.