Aula

When I was a kid in school, each child had a little book in their bag. It was called a contact book, and if you’d been misbehaving, the teacher would write a note in the book. This was for personal teacher to parent communication, not for “broadcasting”. If all the parents needed to know something, the teacher would photo-copy the message and distribute these copies. To ensure that you did show the note at home, the teacher would check for your parents signature the next day. Yeah, some kids would probably be able to postpone the pain by forging their parents signature, but eventually you’d get caught.

Miraculously this system worked.

Now we have shitty digital solutions that hardly, barely, works, and that cost a small fortune to build and maintain. Not because they are hard to make (its a primitive BBS system), require a lot of CPU/storage to run (its A PRIMITIVE BBS!!!), but because the project involves a small army of consultants and bullshit artists that all leech off the ignorance of the buyer.

There are 2 very core features that you would rationally expect to be present in such a product: 1) report that the child is absent and 2) send a question or message to the teacher (1:1 communication). Both features are technically present, but you need to navigate several pages to accomplish these tasks. How the hell did a 350 million DKK project “forget” for make these two features easily accessible? You can locate the teachers name in the class list panel, but you can’t – from there – send a message. You need to search for the teachers name in another panel, find the teacher, and select from there. WTF?

On top of the 350 million DKK that was (happily) poured into this primitive BBS, there’s the cost of the time as each parent is wrestling this turd. Furthermore, it’s one more thing that can wake up and demand your attention at any given time, day and night, and that alone suggests to me that its a bad idea to do things this way. In the maelstrom of nonsense that flows from “social media”, the relatively important messages that come from the app, can easily get drowned out. So even if the parent sees, and reads the message, it’s easily forgotten as the next message, carefully picked to get you “engaged”, emerge from the Facebook app (also a primitive BBS).

The mere thought that there’s a little thing that can go off at any time is contributing to people getting anxious and stressed. It’s like the inverted Pavlov bell, where the dogs are hosed when the bell rings. Just having that damn bell around will drive the dogs insane.

How can this sort of thing be stopped?