Tags: UGA Debate


The Debate Program: A Model Service Learning Unit for a University

Oscar Handlin proffered this challenge over a half a century ago:  Our troubled planet can no longer afford the luxury of pursuits confined to an ivory tower.  Scholarship has to prove its worth, not on its own terms, but by service to the nation and the world.  As we experience what some have labeled the third academic revolution in American higher education, universities look to meet the increasing demands of political relevance…
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Debate Pedagogy


Paperless Debate Ethics: What Norms Will Form?

Though we rarely discuss the norms that govern debate, there are many unwritten and seldom debated rules that vastly affect the practices of debate. We take it for granted that the affirmative team will disclose the arguments that they are reading before a debate, and it is an emerging norm to disclose many of the negative arguments that a team has read. These norms can be explained by the reciprocal competitive benefit that compliance with the…
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Debate Theory


Research Tool: Full List of Magazines on Google Books

I try to keep up with the ongoing digitization of offline research materials.  For debaters, this isn't such a big issue because of the premium placed on the recency of evidence.  But the dependence on Google News, regular search engines, and Lexis can cause debaters to miss important information.  Arguments that are less subject to recency issues, like the Kritik, performance, and the Project also widen the field…
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Research Techniques


The Project and Switch Side Debate

Neal Katyal In debates that take place between policy teams and project teams, one central sticking point tends to be over the merits of switch side debate in our activity. Proponents of switch side debate argue that doing so offers debaters an opportunity to take a new perspective by learning and advocating a position they might not agree with within a given debate round. Doing so enhances critical thinking skills and teaches debaters to…
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Debate Pedagogy


Card Cutting Tip: Researching With Locked PDFs

"Locked" PDFs, where security setting have disabled the copy-pasting of text, are an annoying and unnecessary obstacle in today's decentralized research-friendly web universe. Fortunately, they can be conquered without user OCRing or printing the document. Earlier this season, Austin Layton showed me this online tool for unlocking PDFs. It works flawlessly, so I figured that I'd pass it along. All you need to do is: save the…
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Paperless Debate


Awesome Tech Fix

Props to Adam Symonds for his paperless tech fix. UGA had been having issues where files transferred electronically (via Dropbox or email) were "losing" their macros -- the user on the recieving end couldn't "Send to Speech", etc. Well, there is a fix over at the Paperless Debate Wikispace. Enjoy! Problem: Someone from your team sends you a file made in your squad's template but when you open it all the macros aren't working. The toolbar is…
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Paperless Debate


The Illogic of "Judge-Choice"

The terminology used here reveals the problem with the theory of “judge-choice.” The focus is on the “necessary” connection between the plan and a justification for the plan. We should not start with a model of policy-formation and advocacy that presumes we are likely to identify necessary connections between action and result. Though the constraints of time mean that components of an affirmative will not be challenged if we’ve learned…
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Debate Theory


Use Naming Conventions to Organize Paperless Debate Files

One of the most significant problems we considered when Georgia went paperless was how to organize the sheer number of files produced over the course of a season.  How would we integrate backfiles and updates to already existing files through the course of the year?  It was hard enough to make sure everyone had the most recent Politics or Economy files when we could physically hand them a copy, and we thought it would be even harder…
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Paperless Debate


Judge Choice: The Illogic of Representational Critique

In accepting certain premises about the function of the representational critique, the debate community has become something of a deliberative enclave. Terms like “severance” and ideas about the one-to-one impact ratio of “discourse” to “policy” are bandied about with little critical reflection about its meaning for policy-making. This post is an attempt to examine the theory and practice of the Reps K, demonstrate shortcomings in its logic…


Do It to Win More Debates: Competitive Advantages of Paperless

While considering the paperless transition during the spring of this year, many of our debaters expressed reservations about abandoning the traditional means of debate. As many of you have probably also considered, they worried that debating without paper would be more difficult, at least initially. The stated concerns were many: assembling speeches would be slower, it is more difficult to pick and choose cards to read from an individual block,…
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Paperless Debate
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