Internet Debate Workshop in the Arctic Circle


UVM debater Karen Nelson, one of the founders of the University of Tampere Debate Society with me on the webcam.

This morning was my second encounter with the debaters from The University of Tampere, Finland in a debate context and I have to say that again I am impressed. We did about an hour and twenty minutes of exercises where students came up with some opening and whip speeches based on motions. I think they have some good speakers there that will be outstanding debaters with some refinement and some more public speaking experience.

Karen, pictured above, was a UVM debater near the beginning of “The Experiment,” which by now you know is the term used to describe the introduction of WUDC/BP debating in the Northeastern United States. Now studying abroad, Karen has done a great job of introducing the BP format to her colleagues and peers at Tampere. The UTA Debate Society blog chronicles a lot of their great activities. Most importantly (in a selfish way) the experience she’s invited me to participate in has me thinking in new ways about the relationship of the internet to teaching.

What is the model of education that we have been placed in our whole lives? What terrain does that model inhabit? This brings us to the thoughtless requirements of one board, desks facing a certain way, a lectern, four walls, and a closed door. Classes meet at a particular set of four dimensional coordinates. Internet communication technologies have the potential to shatter this model, placing student engagement and adaptation to student need on a different metric of education entirely.
Observing debate practice in Finland from my study in Queens. I really like my super-serious academic face in this picture.

Teaching over the internet is something that I am convinced we are going to have to accept as a part of our daily lives as educators. The extreme costs of physical, embodied and immediate education combined with a political will (at least in my country of the United States) that wants to see fewer resources go toward education make it a necessity that communication technologies over the internet be explored by those who understand the value of good teaching. Without that important pioneer work, we are going to be left thrown into the world of online education without a lot of thought, principles or ideas to help us figure out how to do it well. And the students will suffer.

A good example of this is the unthoughtful uncritical application of Powerpoint at all levels of the University. Nobody questions following the generic slide order, slide style, or thinks about ignoring the demand for a title and a name on slide one. Everyone uses the bullet points without reflection. How did we miss the part where we interrogate the new communication technology in order to bend it to our purposes? Does communication always bend to the demands of the new technology? They aren’t even demands, so perhaps the frames offered by the new technology are read as demands? This would be in line with Freud’s observation that a capacity quickly becomes an obligation. “Because I can, I should.”

In the fall I hope to do a lot of experimenting with another instructor from the University of Vermont with our debate classes. With this new inexpensive technology available, why teach in a vaccum at all? Why must online courses replicate the closed off, walled-in classroom? I see a future where online courses are not just bad copies of physical classrooms, but challenge the idea of a classroom directly. What sort of distinction is this, and what are we endorsing when we make such distinctions?

Breaking out of a paradigm of education that extends at least as far back as the Roman Republic is not easy. But we kid ourselves we are making advancements in education when we simply inject these technologies into our pedagogical frame and fail to light the fuse. Debate and these newer modes of internet communication have explosive potential and I look forward to seeing what innovations to the paradigm as a whole come out of this mix.

Pikes Peak Community College Joins Second Life Debating


Recently I have been using the language of building “machines” that “do things” as a metaphor for most everything happening intellectually around me. After the Denver Nationals hosted by Regis and The University of Denver I referred to the growing BP national circuit in the US as a machine that we are excited and thrilled to build, yet we are not quite sure of all the functions. What features are being built in that we can’t or won’t notice?

Second Life debating is similar to me. After the great debate on the 20th, last night I was invited to offer some comments on a debate held by Pikes Peak Community College Students on their virtual campus. I think it was an excellent demonstration of the potential of Second Life and debate, as none of us in the room had met before, and we were thousands of miles apart. Even so, the debate went on fine, and I could comfortably listen and take notes from my (soon to be under renovations) office.
The topic was “Women professors make better teachers than male professors.” Pretty interesting potential there. The format was a modified L-D format with shortened speeches and some built in prep time for questions. A pretty good beginner format I must say. I thought it worked well to create a debate that was not intimidating or overwhelming for brand new debaters.
I find myself less interested, or perhaps less distracted by the technical elements of Second Life debating the more I do it. I attended a lot more to the debate itself, which became much more a debate about whether women and men have measurable or distinct differences rather than about whether one is a better sort of teacher than the other. I think that the elements were there to have that debate, but everyone became bogged down in information. This is why I always paradoxically say the less information the better the debate.
Also I think that LD and other such formats attempt to run away from debate about larger ideas, ideology, goals and principles. The debate tends to condense around smaller matters of statistical validity, source verification, and the collision of facts. A larger frame really helps make the information presented “do something” to or for the minds of the audience.
But the statistics and fact-based approach has benefits in a format that is disembodied. No clear way outside of vocal variety to indicate passion or conviction. The bodies are not vibrant. There is a connection lost to the aesthetic dimension of debating.
This debate helped me think about a hybrid Second Life format that captures the conviction and big-picture sensibility of BP/public debating along with the hard evidence nature of LD and Policy debating. Both are not well suited as they are for Second Life and need some adjustment for the virtual world. I hope to think about this more as I have an upcoming project – I’ve been invited to work on how to transition a High School CX debate format into Second Life. The biggest challenge there is the demand for shared documents during the debate. How can you normalize this in the Second Life environment?
The first of many questions, I’m sure.

The Second Second Life Debate in Review


Not the biggest crowd, but who cares? The debate was fantastic, and as soon as I figure out how to edit the video I will post it.
I really think this debate pushes the idea of virtual debating to the next level for a few reasons.
First, the debate occurred without much call or attending to the strange format. Several speakers did start their speech with “Can everyone hear me?” which wouldn’t happen in a normal competitive debate because of the presence of body language/feedback from embodied interlocutors makes it unnecessary. Second Life avatars have the same blank, blinking stare of a reanimated corpse no matter if someone is at the keyboard or not. It’s an uneasy environment in which to engage in something so embodied, so engaged, and so immediate. There’s a disconnect that debaters must overcome to feel comfortable arguing in this environment.
Again, just like the last Second Life debate, I really enjoyed the banter in the chat window occurring parallel to the actual verbal debate. I think it’s fascinating how the audience and other members have a commentary on the live debate going on in a form that doesn’t interrupt and doesn’t mess with the debate as its happening. It’s sort of like the commentary you would have in your head during a debate (when you split yourself into two people) or that old fashioned good time of passing the paper back and forth in the final round giving your thoughts on the debate that, of course, you should have been in.
Pedagogically it allows a teacher to do “simultaneous translation” of a debate in progress for new students. I think this is the most exciting and coolest idea related to the parallel chat feature. This will make Second Life workshops have an advantage, or at least something unique, over real life workshops. For a while I have thought of Second Life debate training as a stop-gap or a place holder, something you do because you can’t do the “better” thing.
Finally the technology of Second Life is just better. The new updates since last February really made the avatars smoother and more interesting. The sound was better and the lag was non-existent. I am really interested in doing some debate training in Second Life now due to this realization.
I also think there’s something here for those who suffer from communication apprehension. They are not their real selves, so self-disclosure and risk plummet when they have to give a presentation or do a debate in Second Life.
I think the next Second Life debate will push things forward by making these events more regular and expected in the SL community as well as the debate community. With the right publicity (like we had last time) I think we will be able to normalize virtual debate for many people. But what me must be careful of is not advocating this as a replacement for debating tournaments. We must be very clear that this augments the debate experience, and makes it accessible for those that cannot or do not want to travel to tournaments.

The Finale of the First On Campus Public Debate Series

Here is the video from our last of the first public debate series we held on campus this semester. It was a fully student organized, student led, and student run initiative. And it was a great success I think, except that I would have liked more people to come. But I always feel this way about any and every public debate event with which I am associated.

I like the abilities that debate training fosters in people. Student initiatives like this one are great forums for that initiative to come out. They are also good moments to practice persuasion in front of general audiences (read: non-tournament). They also force people who are strongly invested in individualism, forwarding their own ideas, finding flaws in others’ ideas, etc. to work together and find more strategic ways to interact with other intellectuals outside of a “I must demolish your ideas to make way for mine” perspective. It’s debate eroding its own creation to create new growth. Yes, public debate projects are forest fires in national parks.
A public debate series serves the students and community if it is attentive to actual controversy and brings it in a clearly adversarial format to the audience. This way, audience members can find clear and intellectual expression of feelings they may have about controversial issues. The current climate eschews such engagement in favor of diminutive models of discussion. This breeds a seething hate for political opponents instead of a strategic willingness to explore. Public debates take the edge off a bit, and can be enlightening to audiences on many levels. They can certainly steal argument structure for their own purposes, or look into an argument they believe to be persuasive after the debate ends. I wonder if they do either. How would you study this?
Perhaps we will do this again. I think it has the potential to continue indefinitely. Whoever takes charge of it next year has quite the nice foundation to build upon.

The International Public Policy Forum Debates


While my proper laptop is being repaired there’s not a lot of work I can do here in my office, so why not give some reflection and thought to my weekend? I was invited to judge at the International Public Policy Forum, a high school competition that is worldwide and focused primarily on competitive written debate.

I judged in the quarterfinals, between Suncoast High School and Singapore. The debate was very high quality. Reading the written arguments last week in my office impressed me. It made me think about the inclusion of the written in debate, and what a fairly bad job most debate formats do with this aspect of argumentation.

The written portion, as far as I could tell, consisted of each side writing a position paper for their side of the motion. Then these papers were swapped, and each side wrote a question and answer paper, then a rebuttal paper. It was really great to have these documents to refer between them when I was evaluating the debate.

The top eight schools in the world are flown to New York for oral arguments. This was really something to witness. The debate was different than other formats I’ve seen because the oral argumentation assumed that everyone had read the written debate. This allowed for more strategic attention on comparative arguments, so-called “deconstructive” arguments, and summary of position. The fact we all had the same text before us allowed for such focus. I really liked that aspect a lot. The students I judged were fantastic at referencing the written arguments as they synthesized the oral arguments as the debate progressed.

But my favorite part of the format hands-down was the judge questions. There is a specific amount of time that the judging panel can ask questions of the debaters. Either a specific debater, a side, or an open question can be asked. I had a lot of fun with that, and really enjoyed seeing the students engage my questions so directly and with such well thought out answers. Maybe this means I need to work harder at asking hard questions? I felt as if they were ready for most anything I asked.

The later rounds were equally interesting. I really enjoyed watching judges with more experience than me in this format asking questions and using that part of the contest really expertly.

The final round had a fantastic panel of judges, pictured here. On the far left is Scott Wunn, Executive Director of the National Forensic League. To his right is NYU President John Sexton, then William Brewer, Senior Partner of Bickel & Brewer, and then General Wesley Clark, former NATO commander and Presidential candidate. I wonder what it would be like to debate in front of this group. Their questions were, as you can imagine, pretty solid.

I am really looking forward to going back next year, and I have been thinking of an assignment based on this very innovative and challenging debate format that I could use in my public speaking class next semester. I’ll post it when I’m done designing it.

And now my netbook is dying. I sure hope they fix my laptop soon. Being at work without the proper tools for work really sucks.