Author: Steve
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NCA Reboot
After this week it seems clear that it’s time for a reboot of the National Communication Association. I’ve been attending the National Communication Association conference and looking at the journals from it since 2002 when I started graduate studies in rhetoric. Since then, I’ve found the NCA convention to be incredibly valuable. I find it…
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The Rhetoric of Flash Drives and Archives
Check out this excellent piece by Lance Richardson on the difficulties of digging through the hard drives and digital files of Peter Matthiessen. Apparently he had over 39,000 files on one flash drive. As someone who is madly in love with flash drives and someone who admires Peter Matthiessen greatly, this piece could not have…
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Gatekeeping Rhetoric
When a veteran rhetorical scholar chooses to make a case you’d expect it to be very difficult to critique, or at least very well constructed, using all of the arts that they study in such a way to make the criticism of it difficult or tricky. But in this case perhaps the mechanisms of gatekeeping…
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Mental Illness and Accomodation in The Classroom
Spring term was a bit bumpy for me as I took on teaching online public speaking for the first time and took over an argumentation course for a colleague who had to be out for a time for surgery. Both experiences were educational for me. I hope the students learned things too. Most of them…
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Competitive Debate versus Tournament Debate
I still regularly hear that people continue to say that I am against competitive debate. I am not. All debate is competitive, by definition. A debater is trying to sway an audience to their side, or at least, away from the side of the opponent (Yes, everywhere else but intercollegiate tournament debating, “critique without alternative”…
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Jealous Much?
http://fav.me/dczaw2 After reading this piece on “erisology” in The Atlantic my thoughts instantly went to one of my favorite pieces of writing when I think about the impossibility of civil political argument. “Homer’s Contest” by Friedrich Nietzche. In this piece, Nietzsche spells out the relationship the ancient Greeks had with competition and how a competitive…
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I like to make videos
This is a video I made for my online public speaking class addressing some of the things that after two formal presentations they still need to work on. The biggest problem in teaching speech and debating is the problem of performing to teacher expectations which expect students to exceed teacher expectations. This is the problem…
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Music
I have been using Last FM for over 10 years now – a couple of students of mine from 2007 clued me into it and I haven’t really left. There was one year where I didn’t record any listening stats of my music, mostly because it was too difficult to do it (I was using…
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Ballance and Praxis in the Argumentation Curriculum
Me preparing my lecture for teaching mid-century NDT debate for class I’m tagging all the posts about my emergency last-minute pick up argumentation class with the tag “pick up” so you can easily search for them if you want updates on how that’s going. This is one of them. The only reasonable approach that I…
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Balance and Praxis When Thrown Into Someone Else's Idea of a Debate Course
This was an absolute nightmare
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