I like the thoroughness of what Jon was saying in his responses. One issue that remains unaddressed, however, is the question of so-called peer review, and its applicability/desirability/appropriateness at the high school level. Given that this was a major theme of Bietz's article in Rostrum, I wonder if it is only Bietz who has strong feelings about it. It certainly hasn't come up much in anyone else's thoughts. I'm happy to let it go myself, but if there is some strong reason that this argument ought to be held, the time is now.
And, well, yes, lddebate.org is fine and everyone can go over there and chat from now on if they want, but I have to admit that I don't follow stuff much there in any depth. This here blog is my blog with my thoughts, valued at whatever level one wishes to value them. And I'm putting together those thoughts on this subject in what is excruciatingly drawn-out detail, but it's a big subject with lots of facets. If you lay my numbered posts end to end, you'll see (I hope) a beginning, a middle and, eventually, an end. Although I may edit things down at the DJ, I revel in bloviating at length here. My (debate) mind is an open book, in other words, and a far from short one. If you want tiny tidbits, you'll have to go elsewhere. (Hell—True members of the VCA will recall the publication of From Cavemen to Frenchman in this venue, and that's longer than War and Peace, Crime and Punishment and the collected Dumb Sayings of Sarah Palin put together.)
4 comments:
No criticism of Coachean was intended, obviously. (You know I'm this blog's most ardent fan.)
Thank you for collecting all of my replies into a single post.
I think the academic integrity argument is a good one, but I leave that to others to defend, since that isn't related to the central reasons I advocate a case list.
In debate, the only useful application of academic integrity is to make sure that people are not inventing evidence, or disingenuously citing it. However, I imagine that very few, if any, debates are won by falsified evidence where no one ever figures out that it is falsified. I also imagine that if this happened against a reasonably intelligent and aware debater, then this would come out after the round, and the falsifier would be ostracized for it. Furthermore, falsified evidence is really not a strategic issue in LD, because the only really useful thing to falsify is fact-based arguments, and if one has not done enough research on a topic to know when facts are being lied about, I must say that one is probably not likely to win the round anyway.
I do think the other application of academic integrity in debate would be to make sure that people are actually running cases or positions that they themselves wrote (or in the case of 'team cases' contributed to the writing of).
I am largely sympathetic to the idea of peer review, actually. I think the issue is less one of making up figures as quality/provance of the evidence. There was a flap about this in CX land after the 2009 TOC. I do think a case list would encourage debaters to engage in evidence evaluation beyond the superficial.
I have to admit, I'm left a little unsatisfied by the privacy answers. (Not an indict of case lists, just unsatisfied by the answers).
Legally, just because another community has been using them for a while doesn't mean that community has done its due diligence; the presence of lawyers doesn't also guarantee anything. An individual lawyer may know nothing of that area of the law.
But more concerning to me is the moral angle of things. After Elena Kagan's student thesis from Princeton became a huge political football, I'm not sure we can say with any degree of certainty that case lists wouldn't become liabilities in the future. Kids won't always think that far ahead, especially when it comes to going to a SuperCool Awesome Octos Bid Tournament. It's our job to think for them.
And as long as some kids out there are graded in debate classes, we can't say with confidence that they have a choice about attending any given tournament. Besides, giving them the choice to attend doesn't excuse putting a burden on those attending if the burden proves harmful; especially if the practice proliferates at bid tournaments.
Much of this harm can be solved for by dumping the caselist wiki at the end of the school year; sad for education, but safer perhaps for the student; and forbidding its archiving by the Wayback Engine and the like. But I'm still curious as to the full implications of this angle.
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