Westminster TA (aff) d. St. Mark’s MB (2-1) *Bricker, Greenstein, Herndon
The negative went for economic growth bad.
1AR by Ellis Allen from Westminster
Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have a moment of your time.
With the debate season winding down, many of you may wonder to yourself how you’ll occupy those last few weeks of school. You could go outside, have fun, make friends- or better yet do something productive like beta-test Debate Synergy 1.5.
Billions of hours, blood, sweat and tears went into the 1.5 update to the Debate Synergy program. I’ve been receiving about two emails a day about Debate Synergy since October and have used it myself in over fifty rounds; I have learned from experience what works and what doesn’t. Currently, this is a Beta version- so it’s not Roy-friendly. Although myself and others have been testing it this week, it’s still possible for there to be bugs and the manual has not been rewritten in great detail (not that any of you read it anyways).
If you are a debate coach interested in making the paperless transition easy or a camp director, I would love to give a personalized presentation to your squad- similar to the one I gave at Woodward this past weekend- but it’s better if it’s personalized since I can spend as much time as necessary for the debaters to learn it. The ideal time to do this would be in those last few weeks of high school or before camps start. I can also present my browser addon to make debate research easier and faster- and I’ve been working on more useful features for a new release this summer. I’ve received several such requests already, so please contact me soon at alexgulakov@gmail.com.
What’s new in 1.5?
The starting premise of this thought experiment is that technology should adapt to people.
Debaters have quite well adapted various technological advances to be used for debate purposes, but this has also changed the nature of what we refer to when we think of debate. Someone not involved in a debate might conceptualize of it as it might have had looked like when it first began, but before it started internal adaptations to technology. The thoughts that come to mind when most of us think about debate (and the things that stand out to outsiders that have observed us for a bit) are probably cutting lots of cards, organizing files, carrying around tubs, then assembling all those blocks and card into a speech.
Much of the time we spend in debate involves copying paragraphs from a book or webpage, writing a sentence summary of it in order to have that sentence qualify as something like a single brick from which files are created, using a document map to build a table of contents. “Cards” were invented because it wasn’t practical for debaters to carry books around to quote from in support of their arguments; note cards were used. These cards were essentially in the same format of authoritative snippets and personal summaries that we use today. Having these types of “cards” to back arguments became a norm, a computers only furthered this need for more cards. The need was created by a lack of fast access to authoritative texts during spoken speeches, but because we continued to use that same formatting norm, faster access via information digitization only furthered that need to reduce information into files and tubs ready at our reserve.
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