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Enormous amounts of time and money are spent on adoption, training and renunciation of technological solutions that get outdated even before they hit the market.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.

As usual, it’s Bauman (or whoever I’m reading) and me. I offer my analysis of the text and use these posts to advance my own understanding of the text. So please no more emails about not being able to find the exact quotes of what I say in the text.

This is Bauman’s most recent book, and as has been his habit in recent years, it’s organized as a dialogue with a conversation partner Bauman finds interesting. (In this case, it’s Ezio Mauro, an Italian journalist).

Everybody is disappointed with democracy because the only form of democracy we know exists within the confines of a nation state and depends on the capacity of national governments to resolve the issues that matter to citizens.

National governments can no longer do that, though. The problems we face are engendered  outside of national borders and can’t fully be solved within them. The Zika virus, international terrorism, the refugee crisis, ISIS, the climate change, the global economic crisis, huge migratory flows – no matter how much some like to fantasize about their nation-state having caused all these problems and, consequently, being able to solve them, deep down we know that this fantasy is stupid. None of these issues will be solved unless there appears some entirely new form of global coexistence that nobody is even trying to imagine right now.

People are terrified that the nation-state democracy is failing and are acting out against it out of fear and disappointment. Turning to reality TV stars to play the role of politicians is a collective way of signaling that we don’t take nation-state politics seriously any more because it offers us nothing of value. Turning elections into a farce is a way of showing the finger to the collapsing system of state management.

[To be continued. . .]

P.S. It is unbelievable that the spellchecker keeps changing Bauman to Batman. I haven’t watched a single Batman movie in my life. Or cartoon, or whatever they are.

The hospital where I gave birth was evacuated today and the highway leading to it was shut down for hours because some people saw an abandoned duffel bag and a cell phone with wires and reported a possible bomb threat. A really creepy looking robot was brought in to inspect the suspicious objects, creating a panic among mental health patients. It turned out there was no bomb but people are understandably nervous.

This is an environment where people can end up voting nervously and fearfully.

I did everything wrong but arrived at the perfect results. This takes skill.

Another word I hate is “politicize.” People only ever use it as a defense from hearing anything they don’t completely agree with. It’s a childish way of hiding from the world which consists of closing one’s eyes and hoping that this would cancel any uncomfortable reality.

“Don’t politicize the election!”
“Why do you always have to politicize every discussion of the US Congress?”

Whenever anything at all happens in the world, one has to brace oneself for a chorus of nervous nellies and meek mikes to start chanting, “Don’t politicize!” And everybody is expected to cater to their childishness.

A friend wrote an article about the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Yes, I know, boring, but bear with me, it will get very interesting.

In her research, she established that after the collapse of the USSR the traditional heavily patriarchal structures of Azerbaijan came back in full force. The Soviets had driven them underground, to an extent, but after the Soviets went away, Azeris jumped headlong into what was their traditional way of being: women were beaten, treated like cattle, forced into arranged marriages yet were fully complicit with this way of life.

Nobody wants to publish this article because it contradicts the fantasy life of well-fed American academics.

It doesn’t matter if you spent a lot of time in Azerbaijan doing research, interviewing actual human beings, and analyzing your findings. American academics have decided that cultural differences don’t exist and everybody is a miniature American, wanting what Americans want and doing what Americans do. So the only publishable thing you can write about Azerbaijan is that Azeri women are fighting for their liberation from patriarchal strictures even when you know for a fact they are doing no such thing.

I mean, if Americans are into affirmative consent, the rest of the world can’t possibly not be obsessed with it.

The stubborn refusal to believe in the existence of cultural differences puts humongous limitations on research.

The police are there to protect the gay marchers, obviously. And they did their job very well. This is very touching.

I just wanted to share some positive news pertaining to gay rights on this day. Love will prevail in the end!

Ukrainians, in the meantime, did manage to hold their Pride. Two participants were attacked by haters but they are fine. The law enforcement worked very hard to make the Pride happen.

This is a huge deal in a deeply homophobic society that is struggling to move towards civilization and away from barbarity. I never thought I would see the day when this would be possible.