It's summer, so it's time to make some YouTube lectures again!
See what you think of my suggestions for setting up a debate. Comments welcome!
Last weekend I was so lucky to be able to participate in an event at the University of Rochester celebrating Prof. Sam Nelson who has been a debate coach and teacher for a very long time.
His old students and assistants from all over the U.S. attended the surprise and shared their stories of how Sam transformed their lives. It was really an honor to be present for all of that testimony.
This is the vlog I made of my perspective of the trip and everything I did and thought about when I was there. This really inspired me to think about debate (what doesn't you might ask) from a variety of different perspectives.
It was so good to see Sam and to catch up with some of the old friends and students from my time working there. I was coaching at the University of Rochester from 2001 - 2002, and again from fall 2003 through 2004. From the Fall of 2002 to the spring of 2003, I lived in Syracuse, NY and attended Syracuse University. I did stop by from time to time to say hi to the folks working there at the time and Sam.
I'm looking forward to visiting Rochester again already!
It took forever - blame Taylor and Francis because, well, it's most likely their fault - but I finally got another essay out about debate theory and history.
This was a special issue that was supposed to come out a long time ago about the so-called 'joint championship' of Wake Forest that year, winning both the CEDA and NDT championship tournament. If you don't know what that means, that's fine - that was the point of the special issue. So join the club: What does it mean? What should it mean?
I reread my piece and it seems ok, however I prefer the one I originally wrote which bled a lot to bring this version to the publication. I'll present them both here for you to take a look at and determine which version of the essay you think is your preference. I wrote them both so I'm happy with however you feel about it.
In the age of digital everything, why don't we have a public "track changes" way of sharing our research and work? Seems like there would be a lot of value in there for those commenting on our work or moving forward in the areas we research and write about. Comparing versions of documents is easy and interesting, yet in most publishing we only see a "final version" as if it fell out of the sky. It can really be a great source of invention for an essay to ask the question "Why was that section removed or moved?" "When did that citation first get placed?" I figure sharing the first and last version might be a good starting place. Here's the original draft:
And here's the final version that appears in Argumentation and Advocacy
Comments welcome!!
I'm really sick so I can't go to campus today. I could go and teach I suppose, but I don't want to spread germs. I always tell my students to stay away if they are sick to cut down on absences. And since it's nearly Final Exam Eve I don't want to be responsible for lowering someone's grade due to illness.
So this evening at 5PM Eastern time I'm doing a YouTube Livestream for my debate class, check it out if you like. It's open to everyone.
There’s a disturbing lack of rhetorical principles being applied to AI when they have been applied to a number of less-obvious targets like science, medicine, urban cityscapes, video games, disability signs in public places, mothering at academic conferences, air travel, grocery store aisles and so on. Maybe it’s just that AI is new, or maybe we aren’t sure how to write about it.
It’s becoming clear to me that the decline (not death) of debate is going to have a third act like the million dollar man - “We can build him back better than he was” so goes the show’s opening line. The rhetoric of AI and AI’s rhetoric and the rhetorical implications of AI in our daily life needs a lot more publications about it. I would like to contribute if I can, but when I sit down to write about it what can I say? It seems I don’t know enough.
Then I read this great essay in Time magazine (it’s always telling me about responsibility!). I think this writer gets how to rhetorically talk about AI and digital data in a rhetorical way that scholars haven’t caught up to yet. Or perhaps scholars are less interested in talking to their students and the public about these issues (very likely). I mean, why write about something if it can’t be in a paywalled boring academic journal that most people can’t read or can’t find.
Anyway the best part of this essay is the comparative aspects. The argument is very powerful about how something becomes policy through advocacy and then becomes an everyday way of speaking, and then an everyday way of speaking. I think this is a great start to a rhetorical theory of kindness!
See what you think: https://time.com/7273469/data-monitoring-kindness-essay/