A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

or Fashion Victims

… and I am not talking about clothes. Would that I were.

Where I work, our glorious leaders have suddenly discovered the Internet. And with devastating results. Obviously, we have been sending emails, using Word documents and Powerpoint presentations for years – some of us have even ventured into the blogosphere!

But first let us go back in time. Anyone who has had the pleasure of discovering Silvertiger’s blog and has taken the time to browse his blogroll would have found this blog on Victoriana and the quack remedies using the miraculous power of electricity and/or radiation.

We might laugh complacently at the inventiveness of the charlatans and the ignorance of their victims now - how could they have been so dumb to believe such arrant nonsense? But take pause. We are not that far away from our credulous ancestors; today any e- or i- thing[1] is the solution to all of our problems – at the very least.

In the Higher Educational Establishment where I work, the section to which I belong has had e-learning suddenly thrust upon us by a Technofascist and a Technofashionista. Obviously, this does not affect their particular sections, but hey, what does that matter? The whole organisation is suddenly technologically cutting-edge. Indeed in a rather inaccurate newspaper interview on the changes in our Section – an interview in which the Section did not participate and did not even know about until it was published – we learnt that the reduction of face time with our lower-level students (from 3h. per week to 1h. – this also obviously means that the number of groups we “teach” has been multiplied by 3) would actually result in a closer relationship with them! 

So how did this happen?

It was decided for us by other Sections which have a fraction of our students and a relatively easy time of it. One Section, for example, has one teacher and 18 students divided over 4 academic years with 18 hours’ teaching time divided among 4 groups. Our Section has 23 teachers and over 7,000 students. As our American cousins say, do the Math and imagine what that particular teacher does during the 3-month exam period. Seville, by the way is only a short drive away from the beaches of Cádiz, Huelva and Málaga.

To prepare for this shift (or should I have omitted the “f” in the last word?), we have had a single 15-hour course given to the whole section (with wildly varying IT skills amongst us) over 2.5 days. This supposedly taught us the basics of how to lay out  documents and upload an online course. We have now got 3 weeks to design online courses for two different levels.

Not one of us is a course designer.

We are teachers.

And our students?

How did our ancestors learn languages before the Internet? 

One of the great enigmas of pre-history. Image courtesy of

ALAMY 

Thanks to the political machinations of our Department’s Technofascist and Technofashionista, and to the Higher Powers that Be, our students will be deprived of valuable class time and will supposedly have to make up for it with personal study.

It is amazing how many lives egocentricity, blind ambition and blind faith in the latest panacea can blight – even in a supposedly democratic educational institution.

I truly feel for our Section’s students who need to pass one of our level exams[2] in order to get their degree, whatever subject they are taking. There are already thousands – yes, thousands – of graduates in Seville who cannot get their degree certificate because they need to pass our (largely irrelevant) exam[3]. This is no doubt true for the rest of Spain as well. For our own students the task of passing our exams has just got harder, even though this particular Higher Educational Establishment can now boast of 3 "cutting-edge" online language courses[4].

On the subject of cutting edges, our students are soon going to find that their own Higher Educational Establishment’s administration has taken a hatchet to their future in order to satisfy its own short-term aims.    

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[1] Perhaps we should pause a moment to consider this: for centuries Sevillian businesses and organisations have named themselves after different Saints, statues of Christ or of his mother, probably trying to invoke their divine intervention and protection.

Then came the 1992 Expo in Seville. The result? During the late 80s all new businesses were Expo- this or Expo- that. In the first decade of the new century, they plumped for  Euro-prefixed names. Now, given the fact that neither divinities, the Expo or even the EU (don’t make me laugh!) can drag this backward city out of its wilfully egocentric mire, it seems they are futtocking around with half-baked ideas, invoking the i- or e- shibboleths for protection instead of actually facing up to the painful truths and doing something to solve the problem.

[2] A condition imposed by the Bologna Process on all of those countries foolish enough to sign up to it. Thankfully this is one mess that Britain kept well away from, while still remaining within the EHEA, or European Higher Education Area. The EU has a lot to answer for.

[3] Learning foreign languages is all fine and dandy, but I think that to demand a certain level (B1, whatever that means) of a foreign language to pass a degree in an unrelated subject is completely ridiculous; why not demand a certain level in carpentry, for example? Are the signatories to this ridiculous treaty really going to deprive their countries and the rest of the world of skilled lawyers, engineers, Maths teachers, doctors etc., just because they can’t speak a foreign language??? Would you suddenly start to question your dentist’s ability to give you a filling if you discovered he had failed his German GCSE? How many official foreign language certifications did Einstein, Alexander Fleming or Steve Jobs have? Indeed, to shape the present and the future of our Society how many did they need?

[4] One of which (not from our Section I hasten to add! And in spite of a much longer gestation period) is plagued with conceptual incongruities, grammatical errors and spelling mistakes from the initial page onwards. It is downright embarrassing, though a good laugh for those outside this particular Establishment.