listen to ‘debate chat orientation ep 0’ on Audioboo

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What is wrong with the Presidential Debates? This new video was released yesterday as a part of a new web series designed to investigate debate and argument. It’s called Podium, and I am featured in it along with a number of other interesting folks. I really enjoyed doing the interviews for this, as I mentioned…

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Rhetoric of Reason (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Why were so many people tweeting last night about how awesome it was to have so many students in a room together tweeting about the Presidential debate while watching it? I asked on twitter a few times for a warrant as to why this was a good thing. I…

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English: A Sandisk-brand USB thumb drive, SanDisk Cruzer Micro, 4GB. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Thinking about getting a Nexus 7 after heavily researching the various tablets available. I think it will suit what I do quite well. In reading about it, I also think that tablets suit modern policy debate well too. One of the biggest…

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Probably a little late on posting this, but thanks to my friend on Twitter, I saw it. Pretty amazing video, but more amazing are the accomplishments of the students who made it all happen. It took a lot of work.

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A depiction of the world’s oldest continually operating university, the University of Bologna, Italy (Photo credit: Wikipedia) We are engaging in a pretty interesting experiment in my debate program. This arose out of a meeting I held for students who wanted to take on more leadership in the team. Out of this meeting, the students…

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Here’s a better debate from Binghamton. The debaters still need to work on clear linkages of their arguments to the issues at hand or the issues that are supposed to be in the debate, but compared to the other one I posted yesterday, this one is of a better quality. Some of the teams are…

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It’s been a couple of days since Binghamton, which I thought ran quite well. There were of course, some issues that I think American debating could do without, but they are for a couple of separate posts that I am working on. I don’t think I will ever understand judge allocation that puts five judges…

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A Look at Downtown Billings, Montana, USA (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Last weekend, I was at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana to conduct a debate workshop and scrimmage for three schools there interested in moving from NPDA to BP debating. I say interested – but in my opinion they were well on their way. Director…

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Nobody to my knowledge has done any research or collected any data on the social norms, stories, and narratives that accompany debating tournaments. I do know of one research project that was a sociological study of high school debaters in the U.S., but nothing more than that. I have a few strange books in my…

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