[Air-L] non-Zoom platforms....again

[Mehitabel Glenhaber]

Hi Alexandre and everyone,

This is maybe a bit adjacent to your question, but I have also been
concerned watching Zoom rapidly gobble up a near-monopoly on remote
education in the United States. Here is an informal resource that I created
at the start of the pandemic, and recently updated, warning about the
dangers of Zoom becoming a monopoly, and advising educators about
alternatives, and how to minimize the harms of using Zoom in the classroom:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o7Eq17jdWCtu2CaC15JBbdVU1p7fx2_jReH6qoFafMM/edit?usp=sharing
I hope it's helpful to you in writing your article, and also generally to
folks on this list going into teaching remotely the next semester.

I think the situation in the US is very similar to the one you describe in
France (with the exception, perhaps, that there was less of an existing
open source infrastructure which Zoom replaced - though that's just my
impression)

Cheers,
Mehitabel

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 7:41 PM Alexandre Hocquet <
alexandre.hocquet at univ-lorraine.fr> wrote:

> Dear AoIRers,
>
> long time lurker, first time poster*. A recent inquiry to the list
> asking for non-Zoom platforms gave me the idea to ask advice here
> regarding a project for an opinion piece I have about the recent taking
> over of online conferencing by Zoom (and Microsoft Teams)  in Academia.
>
> My point is that the Covid crisis has led (in France at least, and I'm
> willing to have the opinion about academics in other countries) to the
> complete outsourcing to those two corporate platforms for online
> teaching (and scholarly conferencing), which means
>
> 1) the renouncement to a once functional dedicated national
> infrastructure (namely, in France, the use of free software Jitsi within
> the state-sponsored "Renater" academic infrastructure)
>
> 2) the surrendering of Academia to corporations well known to abuse the
> extraction and commodification of data (Zoom) and well known to
> "embrace, extend and extinguish" anything within their reach (Microsoft)
>
> My point is that it is completely contradictory to a supposed general
> institutional trend towards "open science", and that open software is
> often  forgotten besides open litterature and open data, and that the
> pandemic has accelerated the disintegration of an academic national and
> open infrastructure.
>
> So my questions are :
>
> 1) Is anybody aware of an already existing piece expressing that concerns ?
>
> 2) Is anybody willing to share what is the situation in their country
> regarding this issue ?
>
> Best,
>
>
> * for a little background and as a newcomer presentation, I am a
> historian of science and my area is the issue of openness within
> scientific modelling software .
>
>
>
>
> --
> ***********************************************
> Alexandre Hocquet
> Archives Henri Poincaré & Science History Institute
> Alexandre.Hocquet at univ-lorraine.fr
>
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