I thought Facebook was the favored medium of mellifluous mewlers. Twitter was supposed to be the place for angry, politicized crowds, not for the “look at my pretty kitty” crowd. But it seems like Twitter is getting infected with the cutie-cute virus:

I’d much rather see a bunch of angry Berniebros* on Twitter than this kind of Miss Sunshine of the Unburdened Mind.

*I never encountered any of these legendary Berniebros anywhere online or in RL. I have started to think they are a myth.

In the meanwhile, Western Illinois University destroyed its philosophy program. Completely. Because university students obviously don’t need philosophy.

The reason why philosophy was cut is that universities have adopted the same approach to measuring the success of an academic program as the one that is used (controversially yet ubiquitously) to measure the health of a national economy. An economy is considered healthy if it constantly grows. Nothing else matters, just the constant dumb increase in the rotation of money in the economy.

This same ridiculous system has been adopted in higher ed. A robust and vibrant department that produces great research and educates a healthy number of students is considered a complete and abject failure if the number of its majors doesn’t constantly increase. And I mean, constantly. It’s all about that: numbers up = good, numbers not up for a semester = bad, let’s eliminate the program immediately. My blog is not read by idiots, so I know I don’t have to explain why this system is deranged.

The out-of-control adoption of all these ridiculous and useless “technological solutions” is one of the reasons why college tuitions are rising and professors’ salaries stagnate. I love gadgets as much – and probably more – than the next person but I am absolutely 100% convinced that clickers, schmickers, Turnitins, electronic workbooks, Quias, Supersites, and all the rest of that hugely expensive stuff are very easily dispensable.

There are schools that actually ask professors who interview for jobs what kind of “technologies” they are ready to use in the classroom. The obsession with quantification has led many administrators to believe that the quality of teaching can be measured with the number of gadgets a professor uses. This insanity is now even spreading to research, forcing people to create ridiculous “digital archives” and open positions in entirely meaningless “digital humanities” while courses on Cervantes don’t even get taught because there is no funding.

People, I’m not a Luddite. I live attached to my cell phone. My Kindle is practically a limb. And it is precisely as a result of my immersion in gadgetry that I have established with absolute certainty that good teaching does not necessitate gadgets. If you try really hard, good teaching might remain not entirely crapped up by the introduction of gadgets but that’s it.

Enormous amounts of time and money are spent on adoption, training and renunciation of technological solutions that get outdated even before they hit the market. Committees are formed, paperwork is generated, training workshops and seminars are conducted, conferences titled “Quia or Supersite?” are organized and the result of all that busyness is soaring tuition and harried, exhausted professors.

People, enough already! Let’s stop gadgeting and go back to teaching. Let’s push back whenever semi-literate bureaucrats try to make us feel deficient for not using clickers and Turnitin in our teaching. Academia belongs to us and it’s up to us to set the tone. Let’s stop worshiping on the altar of technology and start making people who push these expensive licences and gadgets on us feel ridiculous and stupid.

Some (actually very few) professors at my school use the so-called “clickers”, little gadgets that allow to poll students in class. Students use them to do a sort of a multiple-choice thing where everybody will see aggregate results on the screen. The gadget is completely unnecessary because you can do all it does and more through cell phones and the web. I did it once for fun and avoided the use of stupid clickers. Besides, there is no way on the planet learning is enhanced by this sort of polling in any significant way.

Turning Technologies, the company that provides clickers to our university, has figured out that their gadget has been rendered obsolete. So what does it do? It is now trying to get us to FORCE our students into purchasing a MULTI-YEAR license where students will have to PAY irrespective of whether they even take courses where clickers are used. We don;t even ask students to buy textbooks because we know it will be a hardship for them. But we’ve got to force them to buy a LICENSE, which is a permission to use and not even an actual device they can then keep??

As you know, our students are not rich. They all work, they all have family obligations, and they all struggle financially. The gall of vicious and stupid Turning Technologies that tries to exploit students and saddle them with a completely unnecessary fee out of pure unadulterated greed is shocking.

Of course, I have volunteered for a committee that will decide whether to get sucked into Turning Technologies’ scam of the year. Of course, I will fight with everything I’ve got to make sure this extra cost doesn’t get inflicted on our students. Many schools, however, will be happy to adopt Turning Technologies’ suggestion that instead of a college paying a fee to use clickers, the cost should be passed on to unsuspecting and unwilling students.

@TurningTechCan : your TurningPoint Cloud sucks, you suck, and I will do everything in my power to spread the news of your scamming, greedy practices as far and wide as I can. You are an absolute disgrace.

In the meanwhile, another act of terror in France:

A man who killed a French policeman and his wife in Paris on Monday night (13 June) had previously been convicted for being part of a jihadist organisation with links to Pakistan. 25-year-old Larossi Abballa, was sentenced to three years in jail in 2013, with six months suspended. Prosecutors claimed the organisation he was part of aimed to “prepare terrorist acts”.

It’s like the French authorities are desperate to be kicked out of office in favor of the National Front.