I know it's just one corporate platform versus another, both hosted by legitimately yucky companies, but my job just switched to MS office from Google suite after 11 years. I used MS for several years at a previous job. I have a sense of relief. I never liked managing email, especially, with google. I never got to where I felt I could easily see what emails I had received in any organized way that worked for me.

Of course, I'd prefer not to be sunk into the AI/antiprivacy/educorporate swamp, but if I don't have a choice (I don't), MS feels like an improvement.

#google #microsoft #office #educorporate #privacy #lesserOfTwoEvils

Look at this. Look at it.

The company is 23 years old and lists $15M/year in revenue.

The UI is so nonstandard and unintuitive that every year I talk a few people through screams and tears.

I like the product in a general sense; it basically works. However, it requires far more frustration, clicks, and hyper-specific, non-transferable knowledge than is reasonable to do that.

#sonasystems #educorporate #monopoly #ish #shittydesign #webdesign #highered

#brightspace is still a massively overpriced, barely-functional, heavily-enshittified prototype of the principal-agent problem, in case anyone was wondering.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem

#enshittification #highered #educorporate

Even "blue state" university presidents are in a tough spot: they will get negative press (i.e., career advancement threat) if they knuckle under to GOP/DOGE/whoeverthefuck, but they'll also potentially have those consequences from other quarters if they don't.

I don't think you get to be a university president by showing "bold leadership." You get that job by doing exactly what every other university president does, which is usually to make loud pronouncements about supporting the "academic status quo" (including supporting all DEI initiatives) while supporting the societal social status quo (i.e., quasi-corporate behavior, anti-labor actions, etc.) with the actions you don't publicly announce.

Currently, university presidents have few "career-safe" avenues of action.

My uni president has finally (after 3+ weeks and like 1/3 of the federal government usurped) made an announcement obliquely related to the insanity. It's only "you don't have the authorization to give ICE/FBI/whoever any information about students and you don't have the authorization to receive or respond to any kind of warrant so refer them to system General Counsel", but I guess it's something.

Maybe someday, possibly after the union is a smoldering ash heap, we'll get some bold leadership.

#suny #highered #professor #corporate #educorporate #uspol #fascism

#Brightspace is a series of missed opportunities and profit-based shortcuts masquerading as an #LMS. Its gradebook has significant, inexplicable (in light of 20 years of web development) shortcomings. Naturally, many people want to just use #Excel.

Well... good luck.

#educorporate #enshittification #teaching #professor #highered

Here is how I imagine LMS contracts might work if faculty made the decisions, not admins who haven't had to teach their own classes in 15 years:

Each campus would get licenses for 3 #LMS platforms. #Faculty would choose which they wanted to use. Each company would get paid based on how many faculty used their shit.

Companies would hate this and try to refuse. If they did that, the campus would say kthxbye and fill the spot with an LMS with less rigid ideas.

Fuck every LMS I've ever worked with, to varying extents (of fuckery). Software like this sold to schools seems to me to have often gone through extreme peak #enshittification

#highered #learningTech #eduCorporate #bullshit #broken #fucking #shit

Every word of this makes me feel nauseated. I now have a visceral negative reaction to what might actually be a cool project (AFAIK).

#highered #corporate #educorporate #jargon #buzzwords #NotInTheBible

OK, I have a lot of beefs with organizations I also really like (or sometimes love). On FB there is a group called "The Professor Is Out" (#tpio?). They are a support page for people leaving academia, which is something I want to do, for many of the same reasons as everyone else.

However, TPIO mods can be a bit... well.

Any post suggesting we think carefully about how and where we jump from academic gets something between a smackdown ("you're not supporting people in toxic situations") to just being deleted.

I found this out when I saw a string of posts suggesting that humanities profs (who have fewer non-academic options than some other fields) jump to join #educorporate instructional technology companies or do #ux for FAANG corps and their associates. I made what I thought was a very careful post saying you gotta do what you gotta do to pay the bills, but the exodus from academia into some of the more problematic areas of industry transfers intellectual capital from public institutions to those actively (in many cases) trying to destroy them.

Like I said, it was carefully worded and not inflammatory like what I said above. It was couched. Couched, I say!

Got a serious chewing-out by the mods for failing to support vulnerable people, victim-blaming, and maybe some other stuff.

Come on, mods, I get it. But two things can both be true. If the only way I could pay rent/mortgage and my daughter's life expenses was doing UX for #facebook or A/B testing for #google, I'd do it in a second. At the same time I very much hope those aren't my only options to exit academia.

And then I found that one or more of the TPIO mods have launched a for-profit job coaching service for the academics the page serves.

I don't claim there are shenanigans going on, but I do have a belief that incentives matter, and misaligned #incentives can lead to misaligned outcomes.

I have not made a helpful post about how humanities faculty in toxic work situations might find more lucrative careers in job coaching for academic faculty who are in toxic work situations.

#academia #TheProfessorIsOut #professor #toxic #workplace #CorporateTakeover #HigherEd #motivation

Just a quick #brightspace #hatepost:

1. In at least a couple of multiple-select dialogs, choices down the page FUCKING RESET all choices previously made up-page. With no flag, no warning, etc.

e.g., for accommodation overrides for students on a quiz, you choose dates, extra time, other conditions, etc. Then at the bottom of the page (actually a 20-line window within a page, so what you already did scrolls up and out of sight) you choose the subset of students this applies to.

And as soon as you do, everything else you have done resets to default values--that is, Very Wrong Values, without any indication this has happened. There you are, looking at the "save" button, unaware that brightspace just fundamentally fucked something up that will take back-and-forth emails, frustration, and crying/angry students to notice or fix.

While I'm at it...

2. Half the "enter URL" fields when adding links to external content are pre-populated (hard version) with "https://" and the other half aren't. If you get into the wrong habit when creating your content, you get broken links.

3. Half the "insert an image" fields for content (e.g., for quiz questions, handouts, etc.) accept drag-drop from a desktop file manager. The other half don't, requiring a sequence of 3-5 button hunts and clicks, then (in a subset of these) searching through your computer's filesystem.

Is it so wrong to want my job not to be made harder because a billion-dollar company can't be bothered to do basic shit?

#badCoding #badDesign #UserAntagonistic #basic #lms #highered #frustration #fuck #capitalism #educorporate