FEED: Debate

Bill Batterman does a great summary of the paper-free issue in the 3NR blog. The article is here: Going Paperless: Can High School Programs Effectively Make The Transition?


Batterman makes some great points. The one that interests me the most is his claim that we will need to train novices not only in the arcana of debate, but what will be to them also the arcana of sophisticated technology. This is a point I've been hitting against one way or another in my own discussions of computers, either in research or literal debating. The world that we live in just so happens to be the world that we live in, and that world has already shifted to a base of electronic information, replacing the base of printed information that preceded it. Not all information is yet electronic, and not all seekers of information have the electronic tools, but the paradigm shift is a done deal, and it's just a matter of individuals catching up. One could just as easily say that not everybody had written down in books everything that needed to be written, and that not everyone was literate, but that didn't mean that printed media was not the name of the game.

Educators have a special role in this electronic-based world. Whether it will be the problem of debate coaches to attack it ultimately sounds unlikely to me, but if educators as a whole do not adjust, if they do not accept the reality that their students have been raised on their side of the paradigm shift, and both follow along with the paradigm and make sure that students who are not succeeding in the paradigm are educated to do so, they will not be doing their jobs correctly. Every argument an educator makes against electronics is likely to be wrong, with a few exceptions (see my discussion with CP on computers in Extemp for an example, CP's, of a meaningful argument against electronics, very specific, entirely competition-based). The odd thing is, of course, that technophilia and technophobia are not age-linked. The old are not by nature against it, and the young are not by nature masters of it. There is plenty of evidence to prove this.

I wonder how long we'll be arguing about this. Batterman talks about some of the state organizations, and also about how some folks who are anti-computer will be in the business of sitting in the back of the room regardless, and will nonetheless have to be dealt with. People strike me from the pool because I don't like non-resolutional debate. Future strikes will be against judges who don't like computers. It's a funny world we live in.