The New York Sophist

Irish Times clock on the new building at Townsend Street, Dublin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is our second time hosting the Irish Times debate champions in New York. We were very pleased that the NPDA and the Times chose us as the anchor point for the start of this tour.

The debate we had was quite good. The Irish debaters are more Irish Times format debaters and not BP/Worlds debaters, which made for an interesting BP/Worlds debate.

Since I was hosting the debaters at my house, there was plenty of time to discuss debate and the various issues surrounding it. The best part was the critiques of BP/Worlds format offered by the Irish debaters:

1. Worlds format has too fast a delivery to be meaningful.

2. Arguments that are automatically persuasive in Worlds format would never be persuasive, or hardly ever persuasive, outside of that particular audience.

3. The debate is too technical, and people make a large amount of arguments in each speech

This sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Worlds is more like Policy debate than we realized.

I suppose any style of debate, modified for competition would lean toward these issues. As the audience becomes cut off from the general public, the audience demands more specialty from the speakers. Ironically, this marking is under the rubric of “more persuasive” argumentation.

How far down does the rabbit hole go?

Here is the public debate we had with the Irish, in Worlds format. I hope you enjoy it!

Irish Times clock on the new building at Townsend Street, Dublin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is our second time hosting the Irish Times debate champions in New York. We were very pleased that the NPDA and the Times chose us as the anchor point for the start of this tour.

The debate we had was quite good. The Irish debaters are more Irish Times format debaters and not BP/Worlds debaters, which made for an interesting BP/Worlds debate.

Since I was hosting the debaters at my house, there was plenty of time to discuss debate and the various issues surrounding it. The best part was the critiques of BP/Worlds format offered by the Irish debaters:

1. Worlds format has too fast a delivery to be meaningful.

2. Arguments that are automatically persuasive in Worlds format would never be persuasive, or hardly ever persuasive, outside of that particular audience.

3. The debate is too technical, and people make a large amount of arguments in each speech

This sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Worlds is more like Policy debate than we realized.

I suppose any style of debate, modified for competition would lean toward these issues. As the audience becomes cut off from the general public, the audience demands more specialty from the speakers. Ironically, this marking is under the rubric of “more persuasive” argumentation.

How far down does the rabbit hole go?

Here is the public debate we had with the Irish, in Worlds format. I hope you enjoy it!

It’s the middle of the government whip speech in a semifinal debate. A POI is raised about something that the Member conceded. The whip disagrees in his answer to this POI and the questioner turns and points to the back of the room – points at the video camera recording the debate. The whip says, “Sure check the video later, you’ll see you are wrong.”

But why not check the camera during the debate?

Every year, and seemingly every tournament, the presence of the digital world becomes more pronounced. Twitter is almost a mainstay at most IVs – to have a tournament with no updates at all from twitter is nearly unthinkable. And WUDC – as well as EUDC and other major championships now stream live debates for the audience at home. Many people use their phones or cameras that make high quality direct-to-web video to film rounds or parts of rounds. Debate is having an increased presence worldwide due to this technology. You can call up many rounds and most from top IVs and Worlds and watch them whenever you want. It’s a great teaching tool and as many of you know I am a very big advocate of filming as many rounds as we can.

Many people are resistant to being filmed and having rounds placed online. But what if it was included as a part of the competitive aspect of debate? How long before that gesture in the round I saw becomes an official request for instant replay? How would a technology like this change or effect the way you feel about being filmed in debates? How would it change the way you debate?

I think this is somewhat inevitable. Digital video quality is going up and cost of bandwidth is going down. Soon the cost will be so low and the quality will be so high that more debate tournaments will happen online than they will in physical spaces. I imagine, like most technology, that the presence of it will slowly transform from a nice extra to a mandated component of the competition. The first step, happening sooner that we all think, will be the ability of judges to roll back to particular speeches and use them during adjudications. This might be too much freedom for the judges, so the rules will probably be augmented to give each team one formal request for the judges to review a part of a speech or a particular speech from their side or the opponents’ speeches during the adjudication. Or perhaps if the judges want to see a speech or a part of a speech, they must get consent from all the debaters involved in the round. Perhaps a simple majority will suffice to allow the judges to review the debate and let the replay matter in the decision.

But this will just be mere commonplace in just a few years. What will this look like in 10 years?

Tournaments will be hosted and happen on websites or particular domains. Partners might be together or might work apart using ventrillo or video equivalent to communicate between one another. The interface will allow camera shots from or of any other debaters in the round.

When it’s your turn to speak, you have been putting together a package using video editing software on your end. When you refer to another speaker’s arguments, you show a clip. If you are whipping, you might choose to have placed together many clips of the other bench speaking to prove how they use (over use, or perhaps misunderstand) a word that they base their principle on. Perhaps even YouTube clips or other types of digital media could be incorporated into the speech as you give it. POIs are indicated on your screen, and you click to change cameras to those who you want to take. The software produces a final cut of the debate, only what you allow the main camera to see when you are speaking, with the exception of POIs. The final debate is archived, after the adjudication is appended to the video.

Years and years of debate videos can be searched by speech or by debater. We can watch over the years as our practice changes, for the better or for the worse. Most importantly, there would be gradual evidence to map changes in practice as opposed to the anecdotal stories we get now. And people could return to the video to construct counter-narratives to the dominant belief of the circuit on where these practices came from.

Is this something good? Could we enjoy this type of competition? I hope we can either preserve our current practices with heavy subsidy, for the cost won’t be attractive to most institutions or debaters or dissuade these changes from happening. The appearance of technology usually comes with a compelling demand to use it.

Pedagogically these videos are wonderful. But will their presence lead to the formal inclusion of video as a part of the competition?

It’s the middle of the government whip speech in a semifinal debate. A POI is raised about something that the Member conceded. The whip disagrees in his answer to this POI and the questioner turns and points to the back of the room – points at the video camera recording the debate. The whip says, “Sure check the video later, you’ll see you are wrong.”

But why not check the camera during the debate?

Every year, and seemingly every tournament, the presence of the digital world becomes more pronounced. Twitter is almost a mainstay at most IVs – to have a tournament with no updates at all from twitter is nearly unthinkable. And WUDC – as well as EUDC and other major championships now stream live debates for the audience at home. Many people use their phones or cameras that make high quality direct-to-web video to film rounds or parts of rounds. Debate is having an increased presence worldwide due to this technology. You can call up many rounds and most from top IVs and Worlds and watch them whenever you want. It’s a great teaching tool and as many of you know I am a very big advocate of filming as many rounds as we can.

Many people are resistant to being filmed and having rounds placed online. But what if it was included as a part of the competitive aspect of debate? How long before that gesture in the round I saw becomes an official request for instant replay? How would a technology like this change or effect the way you feel about being filmed in debates? How would it change the way you debate?

I think this is somewhat inevitable. Digital video quality is going up and cost of bandwidth is going down. Soon the cost will be so low and the quality will be so high that more debate tournaments will happen online than they will in physical spaces. I imagine, like most technology, that the presence of it will slowly transform from a nice extra to a mandated component of the competition. The first step, happening sooner that we all think, will be the ability of judges to roll back to particular speeches and use them during adjudications. This might be too much freedom for the judges, so the rules will probably be augmented to give each team one formal request for the judges to review a part of a speech or a particular speech from their side or the opponents’ speeches during the adjudication. Or perhaps if the judges want to see a speech or a part of a speech, they must get consent from all the debaters involved in the round. Perhaps a simple majority will suffice to allow the judges to review the debate and let the replay matter in the decision.

But this will just be mere commonplace in just a few years. What will this look like in 10 years?

Tournaments will be hosted and happen on websites or particular domains. Partners might be together or might work apart using ventrillo or video equivalent to communicate between one another. The interface will allow camera shots from or of any other debaters in the round.

When it’s your turn to speak, you have been putting together a package using video editing software on your end. When you refer to another speaker’s arguments, you show a clip. If you are whipping, you might choose to have placed together many clips of the other bench speaking to prove how they use (over use, or perhaps misunderstand) a word that they base their principle on. Perhaps even YouTube clips or other types of digital media could be incorporated into the speech as you give it. POIs are indicated on your screen, and you click to change cameras to those who you want to take. The software produces a final cut of the debate, only what you allow the main camera to see when you are speaking, with the exception of POIs. The final debate is archived, after the adjudication is appended to the video.

Years and years of debate videos can be searched by speech or by debater. We can watch over the years as our practice changes, for the better or for the worse. Most importantly, there would be gradual evidence to map changes in practice as opposed to the anecdotal stories we get now. And people could return to the video to construct counter-narratives to the dominant belief of the circuit on where these practices came from.

Is this something good? Could we enjoy this type of competition? I hope we can either preserve our current practices with heavy subsidy, for the cost won’t be attractive to most institutions or debaters or dissuade these changes from happening. The appearance of technology usually comes with a compelling demand to use it.

Pedagogically these videos are wonderful. But will their presence lead to the formal inclusion of video as a part of the competition?

Here it is. I probably shouldn’t post it, because I make a lot of mistakes, but I was distracted pretty heavily by the technology I was using. Not the best idea to use some new tech when you are trying to teach, but I wanted to give it a try. Also, I had the audience a bit wrong, so I had to adapt on the fly to address the things I thought they might like to know about. In the future I think that the comparisons to policy debate’s attempt to “mind the gap” might be something best left for the end. Or a paper. Yea, probably a paper (this is indeed how my inventional process works – talk about something, become unsatisfied, write down a lot of stuff about it, make it into an essay).

I used a small mixer and a professional microphone to record this on my end, on the other end I am not sure what they had but it looks like it was just a very nice Mac microphone built into the laptop. The sound quality is quite good and it makes me excited to try making some short podcasts about debate!

Things to consider:

1. Delay in reaction – there’s a bit of a delay from the crowd reaction to what I’m saying and it’s hard to attend to it.

2. Moving around things on the computer screen is distracting to my narrative flow – it’s pretty obvious – but I think that will work itself out over time and with some familiarity. More tests are needed.

3. Interactivity. So many simple-minded folks critique this sort of teaching by saying it’s not face to face so you lose something. What is lost? I think the Q&A is possibly the best part. I think unfamiliarity and a lack of experience with the technology is what prompts this criticism.

I fully expect that most Universities will demand 10% of their courses University wide be taught exclusively online over the next 5 years. I hope to get a bit more practice in before this happens.

Last week I shot some asynchronous teaching videos for our University’s “Storm Talk” series – which is where they ask professors to talk about things that interest them for a few minutes here and there and post them to social media sites for student reaction. This might have a bit better application for pedagogy than the “live lecture” – Lecturing might return to its popularly considered form of being ineffective, but this form might be super-effective online, where students can treat the lecture like a “text” – flipping back and forth through it to concentrate on the parts that they consider most difficult or most valuable.