To Mike Hester, have no fear, Tria is only letting me post if I meet a daily page quota on the book. She says that I’m poor at multi-tasking so she is training me appropriately. Nuff said. These are my merger discussion conclusions and questions moving forward from them: I. General conclusions a. There were 3-4 times as many private back channel discussions as there were public posts. b. When I reference past arguments, I will cite the person(s) who made argument if it was a director and if they made argument publicly but not if it was private. Please correct me if I make in mistakes in accurate citing. c. My focus is now moving to the relationship between the missions of CEDA/NDT and how they operationalize those missions with an emphasis on competitive practices. II. Specific Conclusions a. One group supports CEDA/NDT having a similar competitive mission (create the best/preferred model of debate towards the goal of excellence (Smith, Hoe). The primary difference as I understand it is that CEDA has a primary role of supporting institutions, directors, and students through initiatives aimed at increasing debate (Hoe). The current practices seem to support that the membership wants this direction as demonstrated by it being the status quo (Smith). b. Second group supports CEDA/NDT having different missions and open to the possibility of changing CEDA competitive practices towards supporting their different mission (Berch, Elliott, Ellis, Korcok, Massey, Snider, Warner). There exists some wide variance over how to do this among this group. III. New questions for group which supports similar competitive mission by CEDA/NDT. a. Do you feel that organizational mission statements are important? If yes, do you feel that the mission statements accurately convey the status quo for each organization? b. This group generally supports a narrow, more limited topic. Do you see any pedagogy value in the element of surprise or unpredictability in debate? If so, how much? If so, how do current competitive practices create the element of unpredictability? c. If you do not support any element of surprise, is there a comparable real world educational activity that strives for and/or achieves a lack of predictability? d. Finally, what, if any, do you think the role of non-carded assertions should be in debate? Do you think we currently achieve that role successfully? What competitive initiatives, if any, would you support to change that role? IV. New questions for group willing to support different CEDA/NDT competitive missions. Here I’m going to start with a hypothetical example to focus this discussion. CEDA passes a resolution/by-law/constitutional amendment calling for the following changes in competitive practices: 1) Voting for a simple, relatively broad policy topic (USFG should substantially change or increase or decrease or eliminate or reduce something); 2) CEDA strongly reduces it's attempts at creating competitive limits through topic wording regulation, instead choosing to create those limits by sanctioning a diverse group of tournament formats. CEDA decides to sanction a diverse group of tournaments that offer: a) different ways of preferring judges (some MPJ, some strikes; and some random); b) different types of judges (some tournaments with a topic expert component, some with a non-academic debate trained component) and some with exclusive debate trained judges; c) support alternative resolution constructions for sanctioned tournaments; d) offers different tournament lengths. Some protocol by the Executive Council is developed for how this operates by it's goal is to preserve tournament format diversity. 3) CEDA encourages regionalization and development of a separate national circuit through the sanctioning, the sweepstakes, and the CEDA registration process. One idea might be to have on e sanctioned national tournament per month (in larger metropolitan areas with the resources necessary to support national travel) while also supporting creation of a diverse set of tournaments in each region. Might include some level of mandatory regional participation to register for CEDA nationals, or perhaps some points incentives (double points for attending a regional tournament) to encourage regional participation. 4) Restructure the points system and potentially create some small requirements for nationals participation based on 2-3. 5) CEDA cooperates with NDT if they are interested on creating a narrower version of the topic as their way of creating preparation limits in debate, as well as coordination perhaps on national tournament scheduling. Perhaps CEDA reserves the 2nd weekend a month for it's national tournaments and NDT reserves the 4th weekend to allow for cross-pollination of those interested in participating in both. 6) Data collection comparing and contrasting the different methods of limiting debates is part of the assessment process, including participant survey data. Mandatory review of entire process after 3 years.
My questions for the group interested in changing CEDA competitive practices:a. Is the idea of a national circuit of events with various tournament formats and practices appealing to you? b. Do you think this would provide some real checks on competitive practices relating to debating a broad topic? c. Do you think that effective use of tournament sanctioning has the possibility of providing sufficient checks on the preparation process? d. Do you think your personal conception of what the best policy debater on this national circuit is would be the same as your current conception? Again, I'll take information publicly or privately. I'll likely only post every 2 or 3 days publicly to allow for information to float in. I will engage you privately if you write as well as continue any edebate discussions that folks want to have. Thanks for the participation, it has been great. Ede
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