Excellent Grant Proposal Resources

For those of you out there looking for alternative funding sources and considering grant writing, I can attest from personal experience how difficult it can be.  A good grant proposal often seemed like obscenity to me – no one could define it, but they knew it when they saw it.  But, this post over at educatednation provides [...]

Get your students judging!

I am a staunch believer in the power of judging as an educational tool!  This weekend CSU Chico will be holding its Rookie Tournament and everyone on the team is required to judge.  In addition, I strongly encourage my students to judge high school speech and debate competitions whenever possible.  The p0wer of perspective can [...]

Happy Black Friday…

I hope you are all enjoying a weekend that is both tournament and conference-free (for those who just returned from NCA).  I wish you a Happy Thanksgiving weekend and a good return to reality next week. 

Research on forensics – a little inspiration

A few days ago, I posted an article from the National Forensic Journal on how to effectively do research on forensics.  Although the article was from 1990, I thought much of it was still valuable information.  Another article in that same issue of the Journal also has some valuable insights into doing research on forensics, so I [...]

BBC Middle East Debates

Although this series of Middle East Debates from the BBC is a little old, it has some great material for background on the Israel/Palestine issue as well as other areas of Middle East foreign policy.  I always like to have multi-media information in my argumentation and debate class, but I also realize that students may be [...]

Shout out – SocalLD.net NFA LD blog

I think I mentioned this blog a while back, but in June of this year Danny Cantrell of Cerritos College set up a blog dedicated to NFA-LD.  This is a great resource for those just getting started in NFA LD, but also has many a fruitful discussion for team policy debaters and parliamentary debaters.  Currently, [...]

Request for help…memorization

This is a post requesting information rather than giving it.  I have a student this semester who has some speaking talent, but has a really, really tough time memorizing his speeches.  I am wondering what strategies all of you experts out there can offer on this skill.  I never had a problem memorizing speeches, so [...]

Staying motivated without tournaments…

This time of year is sometimes difficult, with weeks before the next tournament, finals approaching and holidays on the horizon. Often students lose focus and research and practice become non-existent. So, how is one to keep the motivation going? I think a couple of things can help:
1) Have some incentives in [...]

Forensics Research – What NOT to do (and some things you should do)

Research is important.  It is important to our activities, it is important to our professional positions and it is particularly important to our graduate students.  Many students who devote a significant amount of time to this activity look to include the activity in their graduate research projects.  After all, it offers them an easy audience [...]

Online Resource – PBS Point of View series

I am searching for interesting material to use in my Argumentation and Debate class next semester and came across the PBS website for their Point of View series.  I’ve used Frontline material in my classes before and thought it was great, but I haven’t used any of the POV stuff.  But, it seems perfect for [...]