I’m not quite sure what the NSDA position is on internet
connectivity during rounds, since there seems to be endless rules, proposed
rules, temporary rules, revised rules, footnotes, codicils, belles lettres,
billets doux, coal scratchings on shovel blades, hieroglyphics in the tomb of
the Unknown Declaimer and even a couple of burning bushes all offering
different dicta. Needless to say, the question arose at Rather Large Bronx. And
trying to resolve the question by turning to the professed authority du jour
was, in a word, a mug’s game.
The last time I looked, it was 2016. That means that the
physical world we live in has a virtual world living within and beside it. That
virtual world is amoral. I mean, once upon a time, the thought that a student
might even read a case from a computer was looked upon by some as the work of
Satan. I have to include a statement at local CFL events that
computer use is not only allowed in rounds, but also represents the air that
these students will be breathing going forward into their adult lives. We
should attempt to educate students by banning the contemporary tools that they
will require for success?
It is a short leap to cloud storage of data. Please look at
a computer made in the last few years. Hardware makers more and more assume
non-local storage. Big hard drives went out with VisiCalc. I have a Chromebook
that, as far as I know, offers no local data storage whatsoever (it weighs
about minus-two ounces), and Chromebooks are universally touted (by Chromebook
manufacturers) as the perfect devices for students. (I’d say for some students,
but that’s beside the point.) Further, cloud storage allows students to share
their research, so the benefits to a team are obvious. Instead of putting
everything into paper files, we put it into digital files. Instead of putting
those digital files on dispersed unconnected computers, we put those files in a
central place accessible to the whole team. There’s no reasonable argument
against this, and it’s not different from what any modern business does.
If I have my research in a tub, and you ask to see it, I
open the tub and find it and hand it to you. Is this intrinsically different
from if I have my research in a digital file, I access the file and transmit it
to you over the network?
Of course, I can do things via the network that you might
find intuitively unacceptable in a debate round. I can message my coach for
help. I can do new research to answer something I didn’t prepare for. I
certainly wouldn’t want those sorts of things happening in a debate round. But
they are not necessarily technology-oriented per se. I don’t want students to
claim a need to go to the bathroom to run out and ask their coach outside the
door a question. I don’t want a student to run to the back of the room to pull
down a physical encyclopedia to do new research during prep time. Tech
simplifies and enables activities we frown upon, but at the moment it doesn’t
invent new activities, but simply old activities in new bottles.
So I will be proposing the following rule at tournaments I’m
running:
Use of electronic devices to access evidence in cloud
storage (e.g., Dropbox or Google Drive) is permitted in rounds, as is the
emailing of that evidence to competitors or judges in the round. Use of
electronic devices to research new evidence or communicate with anyone else is
prohibited.
My guess is that the NSDA will ultimately say roughly this
same thing, in one place, once and for all. It is, I understand, common practice already in policy, but to be
honest, I’m more worried about PF judges getting their knickers in a twist than
I am any other division. It’s the PF judges, and teams, that keep coming into
tab complaining about variations on this theme. I will pass this wording to
others before sending it out to a tournament, but I don’t think it will change
much. And it may trim down the problems. And for all I know, it might lead to
uncovering the ultimate codex among the various extant NSDA rules that is the one
rule to rule them all. God knows we couldn’t find it over the weekend, and we
tried.
If people are going to be storming into tab complaining
about evidence violations, I want real
violations. None of this namby-pamby “they used Dropbox” merde de toreaux. I want clipping. I want total fabrication. Damn it! I want Trumpism!!! It's about time high school debate rose to the level of presidential politics.
Oh. Wait a minute...
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1 comment:
Thanks for your view. We have been discussing this topic for several years now and even recently at our NSDA District meeting some weeks back. Most of us believe we are way past the time to permit Internet connectivity in debate rounds (not all school network admins allow it) and we have pretty much accepted it as a way of life. But Extemporaneous Speaking, is a horse of a different color and it seems many speech coaches are clinging to their file boxes full of paper clippings.
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