Talking about talking

So the debate coach blogosphere (all four of us) has been atwitter about increasing the size of said blogosphere, or at least the capacity of online communication among forensics coaches in general.   Admiral Menick’s latest idea is a common RSS feed which aggregates all the various debaterly content out there into a coherent, one-stop-shopping location for all things forensics.   It’s not a bad idea, I’d certainly subscribe.

But is it enough?   I’m not sure the issue here is entirely platform, honestly.   I think at least partly there’s an community standard that people don’t talk to one another, be it online or at tournaments, about these matters.   Fix that, and the forum may build itself; fail to, and nothing you do in forum building will work.

Policyland talks a lot about itself.   They have various channels to do so, but they’ve also built their community and their activity around ideals of openness and disclosure, which encourages a lot of inter-squad talking.   Policy debaters also travel a lot, and it’s a small, possibly shrinking — some say dying — activity, which means at any given tournament, one finds a fairly substantial quorum of the whole activity.   These factors combine into a world where everyone knows everyone else — a community in a real sense, that actively discusses the issues facing it.   Word gets around.

However, policy may not be an especially good model for the rest of forensics.   Policy debate has grown remote from the rest of forensics; in many ways they least resemble the rest of us.   They’re similar to LD in that LD has a national circuit of competitors and coaches who mostly go to each others’ tournaments and the TOC, and little else; but LD also has maintained an active and vibrant local scene in many areas of the country, which Policy has failed to do.   So to the extent that the Policy community’s intercommunication succeeds because of the tight, small nature of the community, the same lessons do not apply to all of LD, and certainly would not apply to Speech and PF events as well.

So that’s the trick; to start a dialog between the Circuit Snob and the Local Yokel, and get a critical mass on board.   I tend to think real person communication should come first, and then the online resources should be an outgrowth of that.   If there’s a real-world at-tournaments component to matters, then the online part will mean more, and have more respect and substance to it.   At least, so I hope.

I suppose I should put my money, or at least my tournaments, where my mouth is on this front.   Off to email Bietz.

Overhead

Menick urged me to blog quickly; by my standards, six days later is pretty quick, unfortunately.   I’ve been swamped at the $dayjob, which has thrown together a conference for the two days before I depart for Albany and NCFL Nats.   Wondrous timing, but it’s coming together.     And I just now in my post-Mother’s Day-feast induced lethargy worked through much of the backlog related to running NCFLs.   So now, this issue.

The question is how to foster online communication among coaches who may or may not be terribly inclined to communicate online.   But that question touches a lot of other things.   One of the core flaws of forensics, I’ve long felt — one that isn’t immediately apparent, but causes many other apparent problems — is that we lack generalized effort.   There are rather few people who are paid to coach and manage forensics teams as a gig.   There are plenty of people who are not paid at all despite being actively involved.   And there are surpassingly few who are paid to manage and look out for forensics as a whole, or even any given league within it, instead of one individual team.   There’s not enough overhead, in a word.

Overhead is important; there are so many projects that must take place in overhead, not around an individual team or cabal,   but without resources to drive these projects along, substantial change and reform cannot happen.   We’ve managed quite a bit in the Northeast through the efforts of just a few folks who care enough about this activity to administer tournaments for the sake of having it done properly.   We’ve also embarked on a few interesting changes and experiments, such as normalizing the college tournaments along recognizable guidelines, and launching the use of the Modest Novice LD resolution.   It has only taken is a small knot of coaches who have critical mass in the region, and who spend enough downtime together talking about the Way Things Are and the Way they Should Be.

We’re used to providing a little overhead to our activity in this cabal, so we do it naturally.   But our own time is limited, and there are a quite a lot of coaches who don’t, or can’t, contribute much in this manner.   So the first requirement for an online platform must be a real lack of friction.   If it requires a lot of time and effort to post or contribute, folks won’t.   There’s only so many hours even I can give each week to the Wider World of Forensics, and if I have to choose between contributing to a nascent forum or programming a new feature into tabroom that’ll get me to Ibiza a half hour earlier at the Yale tournament, you can guess which I’ll put my time towards.

The second requirement that every forum so far has lacked is importance.   I think this is the one that keeps most people away.   Coaches know full well they can post all they want to an online forum and it won’t affect any real change.   One of the Achilles heels of too many forensics leagues, in fact, is the sense that real change can only happen if it comes from An Insider, whether or not the reality is so. If that belief is widespread, people don’t bother speaking up, and the perception reinforces itself because nothing changes.   It takes some determined effort to re-establish transparency under those conditions.

So, for a forum to succeed and bring us together nationally, change has to result.   It can’t just be an online stitch and bitch; that’ll turn too many people off.   It has to be a place that a responsible coach must pay attention to, or be out of the loop.   You get that by having a critical mass of tournament directors, league officials, and others with a high profile actively invited, engaged and plugged into the process.     So someone has to go out and recruit these folks, directing their attention to the forum when their bailiwick is being discussed, and prod them into active engagement with the community.   And then close the loop, and let the community know when it has been heard.

The third requirement is activity, right from the start.   A forum online can only work if it captures a sense of discussion and byplay, not just single shots in the dark.   Menick and I post into the ether usually, but when we argue with each other, then folks really notice.   You need that back-and-forth to draw interest.   The conversation needs to eventually turn into action, but the debate itself is inherently entertaining — and so, essential.   So someone needs to be the editor and the prompt, to talk when no one else is talking.   That would draw interest from more folks, and engage them when they do stop by.

The fourth requirement is that the forum must be adult.   There are plenty of places in the online community for students to participate and contend with coaches, but the inevitable effect is that the students overwhelm the discussion with their concerns and most coaches turn away.   For this project to be unique, it needs to be free of that effect; there are things I won’t suggest or say if I know students are kicking around en masse.   As part of the adulthood requirement, the forum needs to be totally non anonymous.   For some reason, when you combine normal people with the Internet and anonymity, some substantial percentage of them turn into frothing asshats.   Frothing, ungrammatical asshats.   The coaching community is small enough and personal enough that simply stripping people of the veil of anonymity should be enough to keep an online arena civil and respectful.   Or at least civil and respectful unless someone really meant it.   Having an adult tone is crucial to keeping the discussion meaningful and effective. So that means having someone sift the entries for frothing unproductive nonsense, and act as a guardian at the gate: this person must approve new posting accounts rapidly enough that new members can join easily, but verify them as adults who have a presence in the forensics community, and who are using their real names.     Which in turn makes it all the harder to gather critical mass needed in Point 3.

Notice something?   Each of these requirements ends in “someone has to.”   The trouble here isn’t technical, and casting around for the perfect bulletin board software isn’t going to solve it; though choosing the wrong web forum software could certainly kill the idea.   This project can’t be done without the thing we most lack; overhead.   An editor.   Someone passionate enough to making it work that s/he’ll tend the garden constantly, every day.   The thing that made Victory Briefs Daily take off wasn’t their software platform — I kind of hate the new look & shuffling-story interface, it hasn’t grown on me at all — but the fact that Cruz was there every day making things happen.   That’s what you need to have an effective coacherly forum: a champion who dedicates their focus to it, and makes it happen.   At least for a year or two until it takes off on its own momentum.

And no, that person is not me.   I’ve taken off a few hats this year, for fear my head would collapse beneath them.   I no longer run my local FL, and my overhead time is divided between making software to make forensics better, and making the college tournaments better with more direct intervention.   Find a champion and this can work.   I hope someone does volunteer.

Fighting with Menick

So I spent last weekend at the TOC, as a judge/scout/driver/EMT for Scarsdale.   My qualifying team, perhaps wisely, didn’t want to attend, but I’m a sucker for punishment that way.   We had a fun time all around, and there were stories of course.   Scarsdale did well; no one finished worse than 3-4, two made elims, and one of those was in the quarter.   I can claim precious little credit for that, though I can claim a larger share of credit than I should have for getting everyone to the airport; a non-life-threatening but nonetheless serious Medical Event, the one thing coaches dread more than anything else, sent our Monday travel plans, our focus on the tournament, and JV’s nerves into a tailspin dive.   Every one of those things survived in the end, and I made it onto my plane with a good ten minutes to spare.

One of the funnier things that happened at TOC is that people encouraged me to get into more fights with Menick.   That’s going to be hard, for one thing, since we do tend to agree on a lot of stuff.   But I think we can try.   However, it’s interesting; going back and forth about extemp apparently was deeply engaging to various PF and Policy coaches too.

Bietz is now NDCA president and he used a note in the yellow flyer the NDCA was posting around the tournament to encourage more online discussion by coaches.   He rightly points out that the students have taken to online discussion quite readily, but that coaches have lagged far behind.   That lends a certain immature, fanboyish air to most online forums dedicated to forensics, to the point that serious discussion simply will not take place on most of them.   Every now and then coaches do have to talk things over without student input, after all — there are times when decisions need to be taken that will be sharply unpopular with students.   Students, after all, are ephemeral — they’re rightly made much of when they’re in the world of debate, but soon enough most of them are gone from it, while the coaches have to remain behind with the consequences.   So it’s strange that students do most of the interacting in permanent online forums, and coaches very little.

Bietz’s solution is to call for coaches to simply start contributing articles for their newly revamped debatecoaches.org.   That’s a fine idea in its own right — it would be nice to see some online venue for coaches attain some critical mass. But I wonder if it’s not doomed and destined to become just an online version of the Rostrum.   I wrote a Rostrum article once.   Ironically, it was about computer usage in extemp.   I got a fair number of emails, and then the issue died.   Certainly no one in NFL officialdom appeared to notice.   But then when Menick and I went back and forth a couple times on the selfsame issue, the issue get all kinds of attention and feedback.   Though still none from officialdom, but what can you do.

So the point is, we don’t need static articles and little sallies in the dark.   The real value of online communication is dialog and discussion.   It’d be all the better if folks who actually ran things participated, too.   Meaningful communication, as forensics types should know instinctively, are not one-way.

The challenge is one of platform.   Message boards have a high amount of friction, which young people overcome but busier older folks rarely do.   Blogs are nice, if people start them, but someone who only wants to chip in on one conversation won’t do that.   That’s the trouble, getting a critical mass of meaningful conversation that can affect change.

The second hurdle, of course, is how diffuse and fractured we are.   Tomorrow on that one — and on that point Menick and I do disagree.   He urges the NFL on us as rule-setters of the Forensic Universe.   But it’s all too clear that they’re nothing of the sort.

Menick strikes again

I disagree with everything Menick says in his  last post.  Since his last post was agreeing with what I say, we have a neat Godelian moment there, eh?

 But at any rate, Jim’s right, the community really doesn’t talk a whole lot for a bunch of talkers.  I’ve always wondered why that is.  Perhaps because it’s a competive activity, and some folks prefer to hold their cards close to their chest.  Perhaps because some of the problems we face aren’t endemic, but derive from individuals, and no one likes to call out individuals in public.   Perhaps because as educational funding has been whittled away and never seems to bounce back, our community has been cut down to the people who only do it because we love it, and who squeeze it into odd moments of our lives, like Jim and I do.  If people like Jim and I could dedicate the normal 40+ hours a week to this game, we’d probably have more leisure to do it right.  As it is, we do well simply to do it.  People gotta eat.

I’ve long faulted the NFL and the NCFL a bit for not fostering more intercommunication between coaches.   Morseso the NFL, since the NCFL national tournament is not exactly chock full of spare time, while the NFL proceeds at an expensive leisurely pace.  The NFL tournament is also the annual convention of the coaches, and it’d be nice if we could, you know, do something with that.

There are plenty of issues in forensics, but for the most part we’re a leaderless, voiceless community.  We each do our thing in our local community, but there’s little wider effort.  I wonder if that’s a chicken and egg problem; if we had leadership, we’d have more resources?  It’s hard to say; it’s not like education as a whole lacks for voice and leadership, and we’re sinking as part of that ship, albeit slowly.  

The internet provides a good platform for these discussions and I hope we can spark more of them.  It’d be even more good if others would contribute; it’d be nice to point to someone as the “sane” coach writer, to contrast with myself and Menick.  Maybe coaches are also not writers, or are technophobes, problems Jim and I do not share.   But as he points out, if the community doesn’t introspect at all, then it’s simply begun to die out.h

Tik (pronounced teek) is dead meat

There, I’ve threatened Menick’s cat, as per custom and tradition.   Of course, Menick may also not realize that I’m of French descent, and therefore will eat just about anything.   Here, kitty kitty.   Come sleep in the nice, warm oven!

Menick dismisses the problem of cheating as an implementation issue, but I do believe it goes a bit further than he thinks.   Understand that cheating is already rampant in Extemp.   To wit, there is no community expectation that sources be properly and accurately memorized.   If a student cites the NY Times and they meant the Boston Globe, no one really cares.   However, by the rules, this act is cheating.   Once Lexis came along and made information ubiquitous, a number-of-sources arms war began.   Students then discovered they can too many sources to memorize, and no one cares that they’re breaking the rules.   Those sources make the speakers sound more impressive, authoritative and persuasive, and they win trophies.   So now everyone does it.   Beware unintended consequences.

One of the troubles Extemp faces, as distinct from debate, is that the community is much smaller and not entirely in charge of itself.   Extemp has more in common in its soul with debate, especially policy, but structurally it finds itself lumped in with speech.   Each debate event has an active, engaged group of coaches who think in terms of a unified, and distinct, community.   At tournaments, debate events often finds themselves run as distinct divisions with their own administrations.   Not so, extemp.   As a consequence, we’re often starved of attention and resources; most tournaments are content to put one or two people in prep to call out the names and codes, and that’s it.   Not much enforcement happens, as a result.   I dedicate resources at my tournaments to running source checks, but few others do.   And I doubt they would, given even the imperative on checking on computer files.

So in theory you could have better enforcement of prep rooms to counterbalance computer usage; in practice nothing will be done.   It is impractical to rearrange prep rooms such that the screens are visible to the staff, as Menick suggests; what are we going to do, unbolt the chairs from our lecture halls?   But simple additional vigilance wouldn’t be enough, at any rate: tubs are single-purpose, and computers multi-purpose.   That muddies the water inherently.   If I find pre-written material in a tub, the matter is clear cut and simple: the student is disqualified.   If I find material that looks an awful lot like an extemp speech on a hard drive, there’s still a cloud of doubt that it’s not a paper for a current-events class or a practice speech from last week that wasn’t consulted.   Throw in a combative, defensive coach, and you’ll have a very gray area that few tournament directors will feel they can act in.   A teaching moment would be lost, but more to the point, the students will move into that grey area just as they’ve abandoned proper sourcing.

I’d also point out, speaking of physical resources, that few extemp prep rooms can supply power to 60-100 laptops, never mind the several hundred at Nationals.   The amperage adds up quickly.     Local tournaments would have no trouble providing enough power, but then what do the students do when they arrive at large tournaments?   We’d blow circuits in LC if we tried to replace every tub at Yale with a laptop.   The Bulldog Police would not be pleased.

So then Menick says:

And I don’t buy that even if extempers were to consult less than ethical coaches, it would help all that much. I message you that my topic is G-20’s impact on the world economy, say. (As if, as I’ve mentioned above, I weren’t already prepared for that.)   What is the God of All Extemp Coaches going to message me back? I mean, yes, I’m being dense here. I just don’t get it. And if it’s truly an issue, the problem is not that we’re being modern in the extemp prep room, but that we’ve got some real stinkers who don’t belong in the educational system. Some method other than banning computers would seem to be necessary to toss them out.

OK.   First, now that I’ve thought about it more.   While coachean interference remains a danger of computer and internet usage, it probably can be handled.   It isn’t a primary reason for my objection to computers.   However, for the record anyway, I can explain what I would do, if I shed ethics aside and could simply prep my students in the prep room.

I would produce far better basic outlines for speeches than they could, and in seconds where they take minutes.   Limited prep makes time invaluable, and the difference between me being about to show them the right way to answer or approach a question in 30 seconds when they’d take 5 minutes is significant.   I would draw on my much longer experience — I’ve been coaching this event since these children were born — on pointing them in the best possible paths. Extemp requires a wide breadth of knowledge, and I have a huge head start on these kids; an extemper can go a long way simply by not being actively wrong, sometimes.   One of my students (cue bragging) more or less won the entire season in Extemp last year, including nationals.   She finished first in twice as many tournaments as she didn’t, and had a truly remarkable run.   She could, admittedly, probably out-talk me by a good margin, but if I were to compete with her directly on analysis and breadth of information, I’d absolutely crush her.   I had another student in 2004 (Hi, JJB!) who had a similarly dominant year; he was much weaker presentation-wise, but analytically quite a bit stronger.   And I could have crushed him too.   (Now that he’s through college, if only a third-rate safety school, and has done more living, I doubt I could anymore.)   So even if I only saw my students’ questions and had but 30 seconds to talk to them, there’s no doubt in my mind that 1) they’d win a lot more trophies and 2) they’d miss out on learning one of the essential skills of extemp.

I’ll take a moment to point something out that I’m sure Admiral Menick, like most non-extemp coaches, probably doesn’t know.   Good extempers usually hate prepping on the internet.   For good reason, too; when my kids don’t have their tubs around and prep right off a computer, they tend to speak far below their ability.   Internet research takes longer, and doesn’t lead to better sourcing; they’re looking from the same well of information, but they’re having to sort it out and weed the relevant from the non-relevant during prep time, not in advance as when using our tubs.   Some folks would argue, with good first-order reason, that this point just means allowing computers would have no effect; no one would bother using the internet to prep, since it would hurt them competitively.   However, beware unintended consequences; remember that extemp is not a self contained community like debate.   Non-extemp centric coaches may cut out the tubs, saving themselves expense and hassle, to the detriment of their student speakers.   Tubs are hard to maintain, and students who are from new or non top-flight programs will de-prioritize the hassle of keeping them up, thinking they have little chance of winning, a prophecy that would fulfill itself.   And the kids themselves are lazy, and will do as little as they can get away with.   The best approaches don’t necessarily win out when other agendas are at play.

So then we get to the heart of the matter. He says:

I wonder. If I already know my stuff, I’d be damned good doing some quick research to bring up the best supporting material. Then I’d present an even better speech. If I don’t know my stuff, I could still be damned good at doing quick research, and it would be a simulacrum of a good speech. And, apparently, the judges are not always going to be able to tell the difference? That’s too bad, but I don’t want to hamstring the better person to limit the abilities of the lesser person.

Sadly, the judges can rarely tell the difference, or don’t choose to vote that way, anyhow.   Remember, we’re dealing in speech land; we don’t have a trained corps of extemp judges who are very familiar with the activity that we see in all the important rounds at big tournaments like debaters do.   Debaters bitch about their judging, but extempers would take your C judges over what they usually get any day.   And it’s very common, given the breadth of topic areas covered by extemp, for the judge at the back of the room to be at an informational disadvantage.   As a result, lying crap gets through all the time.

Another wider problem of extemp is that students don’t actually speak all that persuasively and accessibly, because the judges don’t trust their instincts to call BS when they listen to a baffling piece of crap that nonetheless was delivered with authority.   The major goal of too many extempers is not to be persuasive and entertaining and informative, but to appear to be so.   I’ll ask extempers why they always sound like constipated news announcers; none can answer me, but they keep on talking that way.   I’ll ask also why they use large words that cause them to stumble, when a shorter word would be easier to understand and to say; none can answer me, but they keep on doing it.   Big words and an uptight voice get read as “serious” by judges, even as the words are a complicated jumble.   Extempers don’t explain, they show off.   And too often the judge chalks up their confusion to their own (sometimes ample) ignorance and not the students’ inability to communicate effectively.   Given a low baseline of actual comprehension, tricks and games proliferate.   Judges use shortcuts, such as counting sources.   Students use shortcuts too, such as stringing together sources without much framework or explanation of their thought process, if any.   And as long as they win, they don’t see the need to change.   As long as that style wins consistently, they in fact resist change.   Then no one wants to judge extemp, and I can’t blame them.   So if internet prep leads to an more unsatisfying, shallow, string-of-sources style, even if it is less appealing and less educative then regular prep, there’s no guarantee the better style will win out.   I’d have thought Menick would agree with that, given how active he is for pushing for rules in LD; rules are meant to constrain the lesser impulses of the competition, which if left to its own devices may not produce something that meets the goals of the activity.

These are teenagers.   Teenagers want to win, but really want to be respected by the herd.   The last thing a teenager wants to do is something no one else is doing.   They also tend to want concrete formulas; they believe the world can be clear and unambiguous, and in all events they just want to know “If I do X, Y and Z, I’ll win!” when it’s never that clear cut.   Most will protest vigorously anything unexpected, such as a judge with a different opinion or a new set of tournament rules, as monstrously unfair.   They filled X, Y, and Z, so why didn’t they win?   In other words, they want clarity where there is none — persuasive speaking is a truly ambiguous art.   They’re also lazy, and usually have a bio test to procrastinate study for.   Right now the magic formula for extemp involves jamming in lots of sources, memory be damned, and not worrying too much about clear thought and explaining to people who know less than you.   Computer and internet prep would just bolster that negative trend.

If students could be always trusted to pursue their own long term benefit, we’d have no need of curriculum in our schools at all.   But we do.   Extemp is very hard, and it’s never going to reach a pinnacle of perfection among teenagers.   It can only point the way to learning a critical skill, and the fewer blind alleys it presents, the better.   Direct computer and internet sourcing is a blind alley; the best speakers don’t do it, and students who do are worse off for it in the long run.   A ban on the practice closes off that path.

Computers have a place in extemp already; in prepping the tubs, we use the Internet heavily, and then filter it down, and select the most appropriate sources for inclusion.   The limitation of tub size is instructive here too, as students must think about what they will bring ahead of time.   Tub preparation will always keep up with the times — wherever information of record is to be found in a given era, the extempers will find it.   So what I’m saying is, the benefits and skills of internet research is a non-unique advantage here.   While the explosion of sources in speeches due to Lexis and the internet has led to both less persuasive speaking and cheating through lack of memorized sources, these challenges too can be dealt with through stricter source checking.   Computer skills are being taught, in spades.   Extemp is modern already, within its existing limitations.   Internet and computers in the prep room would make us no more modern, and teach no skills that are not already being taught, while opening up a huge Pandora’s box.

Remember too that the burden of proof here is on the affirmative.   This discussion is a Policy round, after all.   Extemp teaches a certain skill set in a certain way, and despite the current problem with sourcing, it does so in an invaluable manner.     Past extempers, myself included, routinely credit the activity with developing essential skills and ways of thinking.   Doing extemp makes one a better thinker, and a better citizen.   In short, we’ve got a good thing going.   And what is the harm of tubs, exactly?   We’ve been making and hauling them around for a good long time now; it’s not going to kill us to continue.     Internet and computer prep represents a radical change to a good status quo, which has the chance of sharply increasing the worst parts of that status quo.   That’s not anything I’m signing up for tomorrow.   I’d like first to deal with the current sourcing nightmare, and then test this idea out, in fits and starts, not rush headlong in.   There’s too great a chance that the whole house of cards would tumble down.

Short version: stick to your own event, you bilious codger.