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Wednesday, October 27, 2010

More Training Possibilities

In order to provide society members training possibilities that more match their personal debate goals, we will soon have more training options available. Firstly, there will be an additional meeting formed for those wishing to raise their debating skills to the next level. Secondly, in the Tuesday meetings there will be an option to have your speech recorded on video, and then later be able to download it for your viewing.

Second Meeting

In yesterday's meeting we discussed ways to provide additional training for those interested in either competing, or just improving their skills more and faster.

I suggested that a way to accomplish this is to have extra meetings in addition to the one on Tuesday. It turns out that there is sufficient interest in this and so we will go forth with it.

The plan is as follows:
The Tuesday meetings will remain the same, but additional meetings will be formed. The goal of these additional meetings will be to first determine what aspects people want to train, set goals, and then proceed in reaching them. That is, the approach will be a bit more rigorous than in Tuesday meetings in order to achieve heightened development for those who wish it. In addition for those wishing to compete, we can also arrange to have competitions between, for example, Tampere and Helsinki debating societies sometime during the spring, or whenever people feel they are ready for that. But I also want to emphasize that this is not only for those wishing to compete, just wanting to increase your skills more is enough.

The time and place for the additional meetings will, at least at the beginning, be decided based on what suits the participants best. That is, they can vary. But we can discuss this, and more, once we meet for the first time.

Now, you don't have to be great in debating to take part in this intensive training. The plan is to make you great, all you need is the willingness to put some extra effort in.

Think about it, and if you are interested send me a message either through email or Facebook. We can later decide what is the best venue for deciding meeting times etc. Also if you have any suggestions or comments they are most welcome!

Video Recording
One great way to improve is to see yourself speaking. You can spot what you could improve on and then work on those aspects. In future meetings we will provide everyone with the option to have their speech recorded and available for later downloading online. The video will be made with a webcam so it will not be HDTV quality or anything but sufficient for our purposes. The recording will of course  be behind a password, and as such not visible for the whole world. :) And again, this is totally optional, and recordings will only be made from speeches of people who so wish.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

No meeting next Tuesday!

Just reminding everyone that next Tuesday, 19 October, we won't have a meeting due to the unofficial autumn break at the university.

See you all on Tuesday the 26th, in our usual room, E301! We'll have a nice, old-fashioned full debate!

Speech structure material & Feedback form

Our last meeting was a somewhat themed one, since we had our focus on the structure of the debate speech. Here's the material used. The figure is showing the structure that every speech should have. In other words, each of these four parts should be found in each one of the eight speeches in the debate.

I also prepared a form that was meant for my own use when I'm observing a debate and giving feedback. You can find that form here. As you can see, this is not a proper adjudication form, this is simply to keep track of what was in the speeches. So far most people have been lacking signposting, for example, so this is going to help me know exactly if any of the essential parts of the speech are missing.

I wasn't going to publish the feedback form at first, but someone pointed out that it could also work as a useful checklist for the prep time, so you can make sure you have prepared for the essentials. If you want to do this, you can now print one of these for yourself.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Role Fulfillment Material

For Aatemarkkinat (see previous post) I put together some material to hand out to people to introduce them to debating. This material included a very brief introduction to the World Universities Format we're using and a template for role fulfillment within said format. I also handed out the latter papers in the last couple of meetings. However, that template I wrote was made as easy and simple as possible, so I'm also going to share with you a template by prof. Snider, which is a lot more detailed and should provide more insight into the roles for those of you who already have some debate experience.

Based on the debates lately I’ve come to the conclusion that, although the basic rules of argumentation are quite well embraced in the debate speeches, what could need some improvement is the structure and understanding of the different roles in the debate. I hope this material will bring some more clarity to that! Feel free to contact me or Pekka (or comment in Facebook or here) if you have any questions whatsoever regarding the roles or indeed anything about debating or the Society.

Click here to find my material

... and here for prof. Snider's.

See you next Tuesday!