The New York Sophist

But it’s still taking my videos. And I’m too cheap to get the full vimeo account. Maybe if they give me a raise. . .

Anyway, last October I filmed 2 debates at the University of Rochester BSTD (Brad Smith Debate Tournament). I thought they were great debates, and couldn’t wait to post them. But Google video was having issues back then, and refused to accept them. Then my hard drive crashed and I thought they were lost.

But last week I found my backup!

So here is one – the prelim round on Digital Editing in adverts and how that should be marked in some way – I forget the specific motion.

The students were fantastic yesterday and we managed to get through a ton of material and have about two hours of practice speeches before finishing up. This morning they will have a full practice debate, and then we’ll most likely do another one. We end at 2 today just because of travel arrangements.

I have a feeling this is a beginning, not an ending for these students and very soon they will have a debate program. They certainly are talented and will do very well at their first tournament. I hope it’s soon!

In other news, I have been named a DCA at the USU Nationals in Vermont in April. I hope I learn something about this whole process from it. I’m excited about it for sure and I’m happy to be working with the other folks on the team, but I hope it doesn’t take too much time away from interacting with my students during the tournament.

Well time to head over and start the last day!

All settled in and just doing some last minute work before the workshop starts in the morning. I hope I can make a good impression on all the faculty and administrators who will be there. It appears that while I will be teaching new debaters some things about BP, I will also be making an implicit pitch for the start up of the debate program here.

I may video some of the practice sessions, lectures or debates and post them. We’ll see tomorow morning how the scene looks.

For now though I’m listening to music and reviewing my notes. I don’t do a lot of preparation, but I do like to make sure that I haven’t left a key issue or component out of the session. In a few minutes one of my former HS debate students will be swinging by for a drink and possibly dinner. After that I will probably jot a few more ideas down for exercises and activities.

I’ll give an update at around lunchtime as to how I think it’s going tomorrow.

Here’s the first one, quarterfinals from Cornell judged by me, Chris from Cornell and Irene from Cornell.

Quarterfinal BP round @ Cornell Invitational Debate 2009 from Steve Llano on Vimeo.

Interesting round, might be worth writing something about since there was some serious disagreement about the rankings during the adjudication process.

This is from Vimeo, which seems to be better quality in my opinion than Google Video, and since they are shutting down their uploading program, might as well start using vimeo. Tuna in his blog already uses it quite a bit and I think it looks very nice. I hope to get some fancier video software and actually start uploading in Hi-Def soon. For now though, these videos don’t look so bad at all.