Does this book exist?
"How Universities Lost the Internet"
or has someone done research on this topic? That is, the fact that many North American universities have ceded all technical capacity to Microsoft, Google, etc?
It used to be students could get web hosting, email, and even some cool experimental online stuff through their schools. Now every online communication channel is locked down.
@rwg The Internet was literally given to corporations in the 90s.
And the shift to using these services is because everyone is using email, calendars, meetings, etc. -- not just geeky people who know how to actually use a computer.
get in contact with @leonido
At least he wrote a call-to-action setting up university fediverse instances with similar thoughts.
(german)
https://netzpolitik.org/2023/aufruf-hochschulen-aller-laender-ins-fediverse
Während viel über ein mögliches Engagement öffentlich-rechtlicher Medien im Fediverse diskutiert wird, sind die Potenziale von Fediverse-Instanzen von Hochschulen bislang kaum Thema. Dabei wäre es höchste Zeit, dass sich gerade Hochschulen ins Fediverse begeben. Ein Aufruf.
Just to note for continuity, and for others that come here later, there's new movement around this subject in the German sphere, now with a petition.
Wir fordern die Hochschulen in Deutschland auf, ihre Accounts bei X (vormals Twitter) baldmöglichst still zu legen. Die Präsenz bei X/Twitter wird aufgrund der dort betriebenen Desinformation und politischen Hetze nicht dem Aufklärungsanspruch der Hochschulen gerecht. Gleichzeitig sollten Präsenzen auf Mastodon (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(Software)) und anderen Servern im Fediverse (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse) aufgebaut werden, deren dezentrale und moderierte Gestaltung
@karengregory I'd imagine it would have to be historical.
I also imagine universities-as-brands would be a big part of the picture -- with falling funding from states and increasing emphasis on advertising, they wouldn't want a bunch of students mucking about on 'official' channels
@rwg @karengregory in NL we have this: https://social.edu.nl/@wlaatje/111289232717206101 — and yet we turned over all digital infrastructure in higher ed to US tech giants.
Perhaps @l03s @Femke @titipi have leads on other parts of this history.
How it started.... How it's going... 50 years of @SURF, the innovative force for ict in education and research. It all started in Amsterdam, where three institutes want to do computing together. https://www.surf.nl/en/about-surf/the-history-of-surf #SURF #education #research #together #publicvalues
@becha @jboy @rwg @karengregory @l03s @Femke @titipi In Australia the emergence of the LMS and then the MOOCapalooza meant that we doubly capitulated: to big tech and then to big America. Our one home-baked platform brand has slipped seamlessly into the world like an Australian actor into Hollywood. (“Wait, it’s Australian? No way.”)
But Australia was primed for this by colonialism which has always, everywhere come with education systems and values that favour the coloniser culture. So, what goes around comes around.
@red_concrete Retaining tech talent is one reason. Most companies, in general, pay better than universities.
With the emergence of remote education and work in universities due to COVID-19, the `zoomification' of higher education, i.e., the migration of universities to the clouds, reached the public discourse. Ongoing discussions reason about how this shift will take control over students' data away from universities, and may ultimately harm the privacy of researchers and students alike. However, there has been no comprehensive measurement of universities' use of public clouds and reliance on Software-as-a-Service offerings to assess how far this migration has already progressed. We perform a longitudinal study of the migration to public clouds among universities in the U.S. and Europe, as well as institutions listed in the Times Higher Education (THE) Top100 between January 2015 and October. We find that cloud adoption differs between countries, with one cluster (Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland) showing a limited move to clouds, while the other (U.S., U.K, the Netherlands, THE Top100) frequently outsources universities' core functions and services -- starting long before the COVID-19 pandemic. We attribute this clustering to several socio-economic factors in the respective countries, including the general culture of higher education and the administrative paradigm taken towards running universities. We then analyze and interpret our results, finding that the implications reach beyond individuals' privacy towards questions of academic independence and integrity.
I think the security landscape we live in today has a lot to do with it also. I work in IT at the University or Arizona, and up until recently we offered basic web hosting and internal email etc to everyone. 30 years ago if a student did something silly with their website that was a huge security hole… nothing happened. Today, within a day that student is unknowingly hosting a bitcoin miner bot and spamming the hell out of everyone. The effort to maintain these systems keeps going up.
@estranged @rwg Aww, I used to telnet from my Rutgers.edu shell account to a BBS hosted at Arizona.edu back in the day!
Also I think you’re very correct about the underlying security costs propelling even larger academic institutions from hosting & maintaining their own technology infrastructure these days.
Really?
I have the impression it highly depends on which university you talk about.
Yes, there are a lot of cool toys, that are being used from corporations.
But selfhosted BigBlueButton saved more than one university during the pandemic.
GitLab is common at universities
We have good amounts of seafile.
Some departments still require latex, and on a good note R is getting introduced in our social siences (kicking out proprietary)
And Data repositories are coming
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationale_Forschungsdateninfrastruktur
Our courses are on our platforms and our video hosting is too.
Yes, there is youtube every now and then, and other stuff.
But it seems there is again a trend to other projects. Tho, it highly depends on which institute you ask.
Google docs is nicer than our shared document tools, zoom just works most of the time, and canvas and other tools are fast to learn and offer free services for students. So student pick them, when University does not provide a service. University of Bremen here
@rwg
More concerning to me is that we did not keep up with the race of increasing our connectivity. So we did not have enough WFH capacity and realistically cannot selfhost everything.
And ofc there is solidworks and other tools where there is no match.
Tho Geographics switches from ESRI to QGIS it seems. (And I would include this to internet infrastructure, as I see more the "Infrastructure" part. Being able to run self sufficiently.)
It's every "history of networking" book? The Internet was originally government owned and universities were the majority of the nodes - until it grew a bit more. Then the federal government made an overt decision to privatize the entire thing. Now schools must purchase access from ISP's.
@rwg
The problem is that the story is boring. Administrations grew. IT was no longer there for students or research or even teaching, it was there to serve admin, who wanted things run “like a business” and wanted application uniformity and billing systems and databases full of the usual banal evil shit.
Some departments kept independent IT for a while, but admin always wins and they want to be in charge of the money.
It’s a small footnote in the history of the death of HE.
Related-- this thread with great detail on the unholy mess that's been made of the covid response, what with the politics and weirdness and monetization that's wrecking the proper sharing of important scientific studies (which the internet was originally built to share).
Quote: "Keep out of 'spray range,'" is the warning given to residents of Boston by Health Commissioner Woodward [...] In explaining his meaning of the phrase "spray range," the commissioner said that by the operation of coughing and sneezing a person suffering from the epidemic can send germs into the air for a distance of from eight to 15 feet. A well person standing within this rage can be readily infected by breathing in these germs. For this reason he urges the public to be on guard against getting into crowds or even conversing in the open air with persons who may be infected. It isn't even necessary for the infected person to cough or sneeze, according to the commissioner, in order to infect well persons within "spray range." The mere pronunciation of such letters as t, d, p and many others will send germs into the air for a considerable distance." Boston Globe, Oct 14, ⭐1918⭐ "Influenza Losing Ground in Boston" They knew 101 years before COVID. You know how? 🧵
@rwg I imagine my parents were among the last using PINE before UMich moved to Gmail, just as they were probably among the last to dial in before the modem pool was eliminated....
I suspect it's partly that, as others have suggested, schools don't want to deal with (locking down) all these potential security threats, but also I suspect the userbase for a lot of these services has dwindled as more come to campus knowing Gmail/O365/etc and fewer know and/or are willing to learn PINE/etc.
@rwg after all, It used to be students couldn't get web hosting, email, and cool experimental online stuff *except* through their schools. When I started undergrad in 2000, some of us were already on yahoo mail, geocities, etc., but a lot of my classmates had never had email before.
Now, many US kids have already been on email and much more for years before they get to high school, let alone college.
@rwg In Norway, if you're a public institution your website must follow accessibility-standards AND be registered with the government. Guess how keen our shop is in allowing user-defined content...for employees that means a very limited HTML-based web-editor, and zilch for students.
Implication of the EU's Web Accessibility Directive WAD EN 301 549.
@rwg My university built, ran, and then gave up a hosted institutional email environment because, as I understood it, the operating costs in hardware alone were jaw dropping and getting worse as people wanted more email, more stuff, and so on. Renewing aging hardware for the next generation became too much, and outside vendors had better offers, especially considering the better features they could offer.
(My department has its own email system still. It has limits, but also our own features.)
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