science and music. and beer. and dogs.
I’m aware of all of that, but wasn’t looking to write a novel about it.
I am of the opinion that feeding students’ information to AI and to advertising algorithms is not a legitimate educational purpose. Particularly when hosting your own email that doesn’t do that is so trivially simple.
ETA: btw, my nickname is potateo. You could say that’s an arcane spelling of potato!
In the US we have a law that says we must keep student records confidential. Yet at my school our email for both faculty and students is provided by TinyFlaccid. I know for a fact that they are scanning and indexing all of that email because that’s the only way they could make reply suggestions. They also have copilot enabled and there is no way to turn it off.
Being the world’s original source of silk is not something to be ashamed of.
or, hear me out, off and then…
The problems you’re talking about are not problems of hosting email. Hosting email is trivially simple.
The anticompetitive practices of big tech have to be dealt with a different way. Requiring all schools to host their own email would go a very long way to ending one of those practices. You would see the opaque, unresponsive spam filterers disappear overnight.