Author: Steve

  • What is a Desirable Debating Culture?

    Debate education, like debate in most democratic/capitalist countries, is set up poorly because it is set up in opposition to a way of thinking and judging. As any first year debate student can tell you, you can’t win a debate by setting up your position as “Don’t do what they want to do.” The debate…

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  • Finally a Big Snowstorm in Queens

    I don’t put a lot of personal stuff on here, but thought I might start doing some different kinds of posts to keep up the variety. You can of course blow past these if you are here to read my thoughts on education, debate, and rhetoric. We had a big Noreaster -biggest one in a…

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  • Who Gets to Determine the Available Arguments on an Issue?

    The ancient question of what topics are appropriate for students to speak about, debate about, or write about is evergreen. I think about this at the end and start of every teaching term. I see several approaches to this question that are well-warranted. It doesn’t mean that I agree with any of them though! The…

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  • Human Beings are No Longer Listening Carefully

    One of the moments that sticks in my memory from graduate school is putting the SETI @ Home screen saver on a bunch of computers that weren’t mine. The small room at the end of the hallway in the speech communication (now Rhetorical Studies) department in Sims Hall at Syracuse University had a few old…

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  • The Reason that Debating is as Important to Education as Writing

    “We are all teachers of writing,” is not only a good principle of education, or a good mantra of focus for teachers overwhelmed my the irrelevant minutae of state requirements and Common Core, but it is also a political statement – it’s the phrase of victory of rhetoric and composition, who conquered the educational world…

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  • What is Missed in Calls to Return to In-Person Teaching

    We are told continuously through the pandemic that students are demanding an “in person” experience for their education. The university is not a remote workplace, and online education is not and never will replace the in person teaching experience. This demand is often couched in the terms of market economics. Education is easily considered a…

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  • Principles of University Teaching for the post-COVID 19 Campus

    Not sure I can cover everything in one post because I haven’t really thought through it all, but here are a couple of ideas that I got after attending my first University Senate meeting and getting a taste of the University discourse there. I believe that the two I’m going to suggest here are the…

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  • Principles of University Teaching for the post-COVID 19 Campus

    Not sure I can cover everything in one post because I haven’t really thought through it all, but here are a couple of ideas that I got after attending my first University Senate meeting and getting a taste of the University discourse there. I believe that the two I’m going to suggest here are the…

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  • Abandoning Facebook, Instagram, and their Derivatives

    Blue State Coffee Pour from Professor Steve Llano, Ph.D. on Vimeo. For the greater part of a year I put a short video like this one up every morning on my social media – mostly on Snapchat, since that’s what my students used at the time. They loved it and we’d talk about the different…

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  • Classroom Podcasting or Video Lectures?

    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…

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