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Bret Devereaux

@BretDevereaux

22 Oct

I remain deeply confused by reports of professors demanding that students have their cameras on during zoom classes, especially zoom lectures.

What's the purpose of making the demand for all of the students? Seems likely to create issues and in some cases rather petty?

Now, I asked my students, if they felt comfortable, to turn their cameras on during lectures, specifically because it helps me if I can see even just a few faces to gauge if there is understanding or confusion.

I made clear that there would be no grade or judgement for this.

And I've had enough students do it that I can get a little 9x9 grid of faces, which works. Not as well as in-person, but it works.

And that's all its for (well, that and for the occasional student-pet cameo). But 'requiring' it from everyone is just never going to work...

Read 7 tweets

Bret Devereaux

@BretDevereaux

7 Oct

I really find myself wishing more game reviewers took just a brief break from discussing graphics and gameplay and features and just included in every review: "I think this game attempted to evoke <feeling1/feeling2...> and it <succeeded/failed>."

Especially for more story oriented games, I want to know if it made you feel a feeling, and if so - what feeling was that?

By way of example, Frostpunk and Cities: Skylines could both be mechanically reviewed as "Very capable, mechanically deep, pretty, city-builders"...

But that review is kind of useless - they are very much not interchangeable. Contrast:
Frostpunk tries to make you feel hopeless despair, followed by triumphant recovery, followed by sorrowful reflection at the costs; it largely succeeds....

Read 7 tweets

Bret Devereaux

@BretDevereaux

7 Oct

Ok twitter, it's time we talked about the F-word: Fascism.

And I want to talk about it in a narrow sense; not in the (basically useless) popular sense of "political thing I do not like" or only marginally more useful "political thing I do not like on the right." 1/23

Rather, I want to talk about fascism as a human proclivity and thus a (very bad) tendency within human societies.

And I am going to lean on Umberto Eco's famous essay on the topic, "Ur-Fascism."

Eco sought to tease out the common elements of various fascisms...2/23

...terming his umbrella intellectual category 'Ur-Fascism' - a template on to which any violent, radical ideology might be grafted; add genocidal racism, you get Nazism; add radical trad. Catholicism, you get Falangism...3/23

Read 26 tweets

Bret Devereaux

@BretDevereaux

6 Oct

@Kurz_Gesagt

I like these neat videos @Kurz_Gesagt makes, but this one, () focused essentially on the agricultural revolution, errs by presenting the process as a 'peaceful transition' and ignoring the role of violence.

That's not what the evidence indicates. 1/6

The short video focused on the role of community and information exchange in the spread of farming, using it as an analogy for "another peaceful transition" (8:50) to a non-earth-bound civilization we may make in the future.

But that's not what happened! 2/6

But we have quite a bit of evidence now suggesting that it wasn't that the idea of farming spread, but that *farmers* spread, likely using their much higher population density to displace smaller numbers of non-farmers from resource-rich zones.

3/6

Read 6 tweets

Bret Devereaux

@BretDevereaux

23 Aug

So the last chat-about-universities tweet went far, but it also raised a bunch of questions which I want to talk about.

One of the big questions was admin vs. staff, the structure of university governance and where the 'bloat' was.

So let's talk about it. 1/lots?

Any discussion of higher education these days runs into the phrase 'administrative bloat.' it is *everywhere* but a lot of the folks who use it won't define what it means, which leads to a lot of confusion - there are a lot of people in the university who could be 'admin.' 2/xx

Let's start with who I do *not* mean, when I talk about administrators.

First off, you have 'departmental staff' (some of whom may work in curricula or centers or other sub-department organizational units, but doing the same thing). 3/xx

Read 56 tweets

Bret Devereaux

@BretDevereaux

19 Aug

So everyone is talking about UNC's COVID-19 mess - and all that criticism is perfectly valid.

But we also need to talk about why the uni-administration probably had no choice.

Buckle up and let's talk about university finances and the 4 horsemen of the academipocalypse. 1/lots?

Now the fourth horsemen we're already familiar with: Pestilence. COVID-19 is disruptive for universities just like everything else.

But people ask - why can't the universities teach remotely, or just skip a semester in order to keep everyone safe? 2/x

And to understand why universities have worked themselves into an absolutely impossible position where all choices lead to doom, we need to start with the other 3 horsemen - because they produce the institutional conditions which were slowly killing higher ed before COVID. 3/x

Read 44 tweets

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