Google Announces "Classroom"

theodp (442580) writes "Meet your new 'Room Mom', kids! On Tuesday, Google announced a preview of Classroom, a new, free tool in the Google Apps for Education suite. From the announcement: 'With Classroom, you'll be able to: [1] Create and collect assignments: Classroom weaves together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and collect assignments paperlessly. They can quickly see who has or hasn't completed the work, and provide direct, real-time feedback to individual students. [2] Improve class communications: Teachers can make announcements, ask questions and comment with students in real time—improving communication inside and outside of class. [3] Stay organized: Classroom automatically creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. Students can easily see what's due on their Assignments page.'

Addressing privacy concerns, Google reassures teachers, 'We know that protecting your students' privacy is critical. Like the rest of our Apps for Education services, Classroom contains no ads, never uses your content or student data for advertising purposes, and is free for schools.' After the recent torpedoing of Bill Gates' $100M inBloom initiative, Google might want to have a privacy pitch ready for parents, too!"

Comments

weasel words

[jbmartin6]

"never uses your content or student data for advertising purposes" isn't exactly reassuring. Let's see. Could be used for research purposes so that someone else can make money off the results. Could be used to recommend mind altering drugs. Could be used to report "violent tendencies" to the government. Could be used to refine profiles for making advertising more effective on kids outside the class setting.

Another misfit project?

[metalmaster]

This has that misfit stank all over it. Google will be all excited to get it out into the world. They'll let you play with it for a semester or 2 and then it'll get the axe or be absorbed as feature bloat into some other project.

Re:"For advertising purposes"

[neorush]

...well at least for the next 3-5 years until we decide to cancel this project.

Re:Local Infrastructure

[swillden]

Google is a for-profit publicly traded company with a legal obligation to make as much money as (legally) possible for their shareholders.

This isn't true for Google, and in fact it's not true for many corporations.

What corporations are legally obligated to do is to fulfill the promises made in their articles of incorporation and in their statements to prospective shareholders during offerings (public and otherwise). Generally, these documents specify profit as the primary motive, but they often include caveats which allow the company to seek other goals alongside or perhaps even to the detriment of profits.

Google's documents, in particular, include a lot of such weaseling. The primary document to consider is the founders' letter to prospective shareholders during the IPO, in which they set the expectation for the shares people buy. That letter specifically announced the intention of the founders to maintain control of the company so that it does not have to be motivated entirely by profit motive, and particularly not by short-term profit motive.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, and hold a small number of Google shares -- most received as part of my hiring bonus -- but I don't speak for Google. This erroneous notion that corporations are legally obligated to generate maximum profits is one that bothered me long before joining Google and indeed I made posts very similar to this one long before going to work for Google.)