Taking a short break from preparing for Christmas and a trip to Turkey for the World University Debating Championships next week. I have been doing a bit of shopping and meandering around New York waiting to go to the museum with my Aunt in about half an hour.

The biggest and best news is that I finally finished my doctorate which gives me a lot more time to work on projects that I’ve been waiting to work on a long time. The first is re-designing my public speaking course to attend more to response and consideration of the ideas of others, rather than the standard model of consideration of the ideas of the speaker in a vacuum. I need to design a list of texts for response for each speech, and only keep a couple of speeches in the curriculum that are purely for the speaker to share his or her own thoughts without a context.

Secondly I am trying to design a course that will be the door to placing competitive debate at my University in the curriculum. I feel that full curricular integration is the way to go for both the department and the debate club to flourish. It will allow for the servicing of more diverse majors and students and also give a more honest introduction of the field to the students who happen to stumble into a debate course. I look forward to designing it.

Finally I am considering putting a debate podcast together that will consider the teaching and practice of debate for a wide international audience. I wonder if it should be audio or video. I think it will start audio, and grow from there. At WUDC I hope to kick it off with some video blogging that I will post here. Keep an eye out for it.

WUDC promises to be great – catching up with old friends, making new ones, and as always those impromptu conversations about teaching and learning debate that really help me improve my practice in the new year. I hope it’s going to be a fun one!

Now off to the Guggenheim!