Cork Worlds 2009 - Post 1

Yes I realize I am terrible at keeping up things here while I'm off and about doing debate stuff. It's such a great time and there are always a million great people to talk to and to meet and to re-connect with.

Worlds was like this only magnified on a global scale, so I didn't do much posting although I thought about a lot of things that I would like to say about it on several different levels. I probably should have written some of it down or something.

Well for the past few days I've lost my energy (it's about a 10 day tournament give or take) and thought mostly about going home.

And now that I'm back home from my first Worlds tournament I'm having a bit of separation anxiety and really wish I was back there in a weird way.

So I think as I think about things I'll update and put some of my favorite pictures up here as well so you don't just have to read the boring text.

Maribor

Here tonight at the dorms in Maribor, Slovenia after the first day of the tournament. Going sort of average for the teams so far, but I hope they rest tonight and concentrate tomorrow. It's a hard thing to do when you are in a very nice eastern European city with a fine blanket of snow on it.

So the tournament is into the elimination rounds tomorrow, and we did not break but at least we have identified some things to work on for the next tournament.

And also I haven't accomplished anything on my to-do list while I was out here. This is a great workshop but I really should spend a bit more time in front of this screen.

The tournament was great, all the students performed better than they did in practice debates in the workshop, and the town is quite nice. Just got back from the break party and it was a good time. Now for my favorite part of the day - sleep!

IDAS is imminent

On Friday I leave with a small group of students for my third trip to Slovenia for the International Debate Academy.

It's definitely a good time, and I always look forward to the multiple teaching challenges that it presents. As Tuna mentioned in his debate blog yesterday, he and I will be offering some insight on the event.

This year I hope to do some videoblogging from it to give a different perspective. There will be some discussions, lectures and activities, but also some one-on-one casual conversation, some student interviews and some commentary from me as well. Hopefully I will be able to keep up with this ambitious idea during the IDAS whirlwind.

We'll see if it works out - It seems like a good idea, but IDAS is so intense that there is often little time to look around and take stock of what's going on - there are so many ideas in the air it can be a bit overwhelming at times.

Nevertheless, I hope to offer some perspective from on the ground for you reading about it at home. Perhaps after that you will decide to join us next year . . .

Someone's Job is Someone's Escape

This morning, taking it a little easy, I tripped over a text based video game called Violet.

In the past I often wondered if there is video game aversion for those who's daily jobs are often made into video games - most likely soldiers, for example.  It seems to me the last thing I would want to do is play a game that reminds me of being under fire, shooting people and the like.

My friend who plays a lot of X-box live indicated to me that this is not the case, that many vets of Iraq play the first-person shooter games and really enjoy them.

But Violet is a video game about being a graduate student. I shudder to think about the people who designed it.  You write, you negotiate relationships, you do research.  All that good stuff.  I'm sure you even talk to students as a TA.

I think I'll take the desert warfare game, I like my escapism.

It makes me wonder though about the development of video games as literature. Something I've been thinking about since the release of Super Columbine Massacre RPG. The form of video games, like film and novels, seems a great way to explore human attitudes, motives and language. This was the defense by the programmer of SCM RPG when it was tossed from a video game competition. He said that if he had written a dramatic piece about Columbine or a novel from the perspective of the perpetrators he would not have been publicly criticized.

This indicates to me the power of video games as literature.

Now who is going to create the first debate oriented video game? Maybe I should learn some coding. . .

Mahabharata - Oldest Debate Ever?

Heard a very good talk today on the Mahabharata. It was delivered by my friend, a professor in the fine arts department, who also happens to have a cubicle, er, office, right across the hall from mine. As a result of this we enjoy chatting and generally procrastinating together from time to time. And Eastern religion is one of our favorite subjects.

So I was excited to hear his talk. He did a very good job of giving ample background on the religion, the places where this work is important, and even a good job of the summary of the stories, people involved, and the role of the Gita in the larger context. He read aloud one of the most interesting portions, which is the Q&A at the poison lake that one of the characters has to answer. I think it was a well received talk.

I am trying to still digest a great book I recently read titled The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen. In that book, Sen argues that the cultural/religious tradition of India foregrounds a conception of honest and open debate from points of real doubt and disagreement. This he terms the "heterodoxy" of Hindu traditional works.

During the talk, my friend mentioned two interpretations that might classify the Mahabharata as not just the source or topic for religious debate, but a debate itself. The first is the sense that the performance of particular characters in the drama push societal boundaries intensely. The second is the idea that the entire poem is occurring as an internal struggle of the poet as to the right way to live.

Both would require more expertise than I have to flesh out here, but suffice it to say that both ideas are worth some discussion and debate themselves. The idea of foregrounding questions, even serious ones directly to God, and doubting God's "claims" on the good life seem central to this work. And they seem even more central (as well as happily accepted by God) in the Bhagavad-Gita. This seems an opposite religious tradition to the West, where obedience is valued and questions, well, let's just not really seriously ask those.

Workshops for Faculty

Last week I did my first faculty workshop on using debate as a teaching tool. It was well attended (about 27 faculty came around lunchtime) and we had good free food and a nice discussion.

A couple of highlights before I go into more depth on it. First, many were from the traditional sciences and didn't see much of a role for debate in their courses. By the end they understood that it can be a tool to help students understand fundamental controversies in their discipline.

The second was nicely summed up on anonymous notecards that we handed out to faculty to reflect on a mini-debate we had - 2 faculty had a short 2 minute speech debate on replacing examinations with debates in class.

One of the cards said "I can see debate now as a process, not a win/lose proposition." That sort of insight from a 45 minute session made me feel pretty good.

And somewhere Joseph Wenzel is smiling I'm sure!

More on the workshop later, for now I have to teach.

Debate as a part of sense-making for climate change

This website purports to be a collaborative data collection project for the upcoming UN climate change conference.  They hope to use debate as one of the methods for collaboratively gathering data and perspectives.

What is most interesting is the lack of attention given to format, or to debate in general on the website.  They claim, "The project is founded on principles of openness, transparency, and discovery; with no preconceptions about the conclusions that will emerge from the event."

I think this is a great perspective, and I am certain debate, in whatever form, can contribute to this project. But I wonder if the organizers of this collective intelligence gathering have considered the recalcitrant aspects of debate - that everything comes under investigation, even the idea of "climate change" itself.

This is one of the underdiscussed areas of the use of debate for information construction or pedagogical purposes - the fact that it encourages participants to think in ways that continuously unravel the sweater when all you wanted was to clip a few loose threads.

Sick

Well the timing couldn't be better - the first weekend off from a tournament in a while and I get a bit of a cold or something. So I'm being lazy around my apartment trying not to get worse.

Since I'm stuck inside on some pretty nice days trying to get well, I plan to just catch up on writing and reading, two things that I rarely have time to do in the middle of the debate season. Here are my projects:

1. Final edits are soon due on an essay about Kenneth Burke and William Carlos Williams that has been accepted to a journal. Today I plan to add in some additional resources I've found and tighten up the grammar.

2. I need to make corrections to and major structural changes are needed to an essay (now potential book chapter) about Levinas in conversation with Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrects-Tyteca. That project is one that was back-burnered by me quite by accident. Time to blow off the dust.

3. If there's time left in the day, begin the preliminary research into an essay about argumentation on the internet through flash animation, using the Roman idea of declamation as a heuristic.

Thank god I got off my ass and did all my grading earlier in the week when I felt somewhat human. Time for some more tea.