The New York Sophist

Still struggling with this question.

The arguments for podcasting are a lot more persuasive to me: Audio is small, easy to produce at a high quality, easy to transport, upload, download, playable on any device a student could possibly have around them (including ancient computers) and you can do other things while you are listening to them, which is how most students study and work anyway, if you have ever watched them in the student center, or talked to them about how they work through a class.

Video is more attention grabbing, more dynamic. It mirrors the classroom more realistically as there’s a face to look at, there’s a human presentation in the visual as well as the aural, and there’s slides and reference material to look at during the course of the lecture. Most computers can play video, and all phones that the students have, with the rare exception, can play these videos. The videos are not portable, but that’s ok: Everyone has access to a free wi-fi somewhere or a plan where watching a streaming video is not going to kill their ability to use their phone for other activities that month.

Of course many are saying right now: This is not a choice, just make the video and then make the audio available separately. This is not an option to a rhetor. At least not to one who cares about the art! Both are very different approaches to both the audience and the topic. The way I deliver, organize, and prove with just audio will be very different than with video, but both will be of the same quality in the end – hopefully attention grabbing, mesmerizing, and great. Of course, the audience gets to judge that, not me.

The trick with video is I think that the big advantage is being able to put up a slide, an image or some text in the background to support what it is that you are trying to say or get them to understand. With audio you can’t do this at all.

But audio presentations are much more intimate and conversational. You aren’t performing so much your presentation to the class, you are having a one-on-one conversation with the listener about an important idea.

I think what I will have to do is make both. It’s time consuming, but over this holiday I will have nothing but time. The term is nearly over, and the late start gives me a chance to produce both types of lecture for my courses in the spring. I think I’ll just listen to the art and let the audience decide which they like better.

I thought I’d start out this semester by offering students a number of 10 to 12 minute videos on different topics. It did not turn out that way. Most of the videos I’ve made have been 20 minutes or more. And for my Argumentation course, the videos are always around 40 minutes.

I’m not sure this is good pedagogy at all for the online classroom, but I’m pretty certain I’m providing some good content. The trick is if the students will ever watch enough of the videos to see it.

In my imagination, students are scrubbing the videos a lot. That is, they are moving the playhead back and forth, looking for parts of the video that they are most interested in or curious about. At least I hope that’s what they are doing!

Here’s a video for my public speaking students on style and delivery, about 20 minutes long – and meant to be much shorter.

Not a big fan of the livestreamed class, but I did one anyway yesterday.

I don’t really care for the livestream as there’s a lot of stuff that gets in the way of teaching here.

Typically I could do a 10 to 15 minute video on a reading and be fine with it. But the livestream is more like a traditional classroom. You could have 2 or 3 hours and not get through half the readings.

The goal, of course, is not to just get through the readings but to make sure the students understand the readings and can do something with them. The “something they do” should be a bit more than “get them” or “explain them back to you.” What we want them to do is incorporate them into a third, different perspective, something that has been created out of the teacher the reading and the position they bring to it from their lives.

The livestream allows for that but the interaction isn’t really there. I think I get better student interaction from the asynchronous videos. There they can write a comment about it to me privately and we can discuss it. That might limit what the other students can get out of the exchange, but I often ask students to post their questions on the Discord or other discussion board in order to answer it there for the whole class.

A live stream also must be broken up to be useful later. Haven’t done that yet, but not really sure how to do it because of how the stream turned out. If I just make some shorter videos, it might be better.

Maybe the livestream is like office hours? Hang out, publicly think and talk, see who comes by?

An archive of thinking out loud about the readings with some engagement and some interlocutors might be good.

Tomorrow I plan to make a bunch of asynchronous videos so we’ll see how they compare.

My last post was about losing the thread, and losing the focus of what the course is about in the sea of technology available to us. I pretty much lost my way 2 days ago working on these very nice powerpoints for my courses.

I realized I was spending hours on one reading. How was this going to help anyone understand the readings, or the point of the class? Where was the value? What was the aim or purpose of that instruction?

I decided I needed powerpoints because that’s how online teaching looked to me from other sources. I realized that if I were in the classroom, I probably wouldn’t have made any for this lecture. I would have written terms as needed on the board or typed them into a blank word document on the screen.

I decided instead to adapt what I do to online and just put a blank document behind me to write things on. I think the result was pretty good in terms of a lecture that wasn’t too polished, and had many access points of engagement for students. The only concern I have is that it’s a bit long – I’ve been shooting for under fifteen minutes, but in this case I felt like it was warranted to go a bit longer.

This video is about 30 minutes which is one of my longer ones for teaching, but I chose to do it this way in order to capture the interplay of the various readings for the unit. I think a longer video is ok depending on what you are trying to do. The only time it wouldn’t be ok is if you think that since a normal class is an hour long, your video has to be an hour long. It’s probably better to do videos on concepts that last around 7 to 10 minutes (but much closer to 7).

I could have broken up this talk into 3 talks but the interplay would have been missed, and what the aim here is to get the students thinking about how the readings interact. Perhaps the next unit I’ll break it down more by reading and try to hit that sub 7 minute mark on those.

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?