The Changing Face of Paperless

As part of UGA’s continued writing on technology and debate, I intend to briefly take stock of where we (Georgia and the broader debate community) are with regards to paperless debate, now that the experiment is roughly two and a half years old. These observations should not be read as a critique of paperless debate per say --- but as suggestions for improvement and predictions of where technology and debate will “evolve”. I’ve intentionally chosen to omit a discussion of open source because of its coverage elsewhereand the general complexity of the subject.

1. Flowing. It’s getting worse and paperless debate is not helping. While judging at the St. Mark’s high school tournament, I watched several teams who, in lieu of writing down the other team’s arguments, solely used the other team’s “speech doc” to prepare. Cross-ex time consisted of a series of “did you read X?”-style questions. Most college debates are better, but, still, the number of debates decided on dropped arguments as probably result of failures to execute basic flowing skills is astounding. It’s gotten to a point where some teams expect analytic arguments to be jumped before speeches.

I’m talked about this with some members of the UGA team and get the response of “Well, I want to know what their evidence says”. True. But, it is possible for debaters to do both. A prepared team can easily focus on flowing during speech time and then briefly read over the other teams evidence while prepping.

Trust me, as a judge who speaks to many other judges, it is far more important to have a good flow than to know every detail of every one of the other team’s cards. If you follow the rule of “flow first, read evidence if possible”, I personally guarantee that you will win more debates than if you choose the converse.

2. Viewing computers. Their purpose is changing. As more and more teams “go paperless”, it is becoming standard to jump speeches directly to the laptops of the other team. During prelim debates, judges can read evidence from 1 computer from each team, so an extra laptop is not necessary. A third computer will eventually become an unnecessary item. For now, its primary use is to provide evidence to each of the three judges on an elim round panel (something more teams should be doing: each judge should have their own computer for reading evidence in elims). I understand that debaters “like both” and want to have a jumped copy and one on the viewing laptop, but this will change. It’s largely an unnecessary “safety move” to ensure access to evidence that will fade as people gain more faith in the reliability of their systems.

3. Printing evidence is on the way out. It’s only a matter of time. Some college teams choose to print the evidence of paperless teams in order to physically view it. This is a result of the complaints of debaters who are unfamiliar (and thus uncomfortable) with paperless debate and will change as more who use electronic systems in high school filter into college. The downside is obvious: teams have to lug around unreliable printers, spend money to supply and travel them, and they’re wasteful.

4. Common template is coming. Aaron Hardy from Whitman College, along with other paperless coaches, has been working on an Open Paperless Project to standardize what essentially is the “inner workings of templates”. So, for example, once created, all tags will be understood by Word as “tag” and given a common Heading level. Same for Headers, card text, etc. The idea is NOT to have all templates look the same (Yes, you can keep your terrible looking and scientifically proven to be less readable Garamond font if you want), but to eliminate incongruencies between templates that cause massive errors when combining files. I’m pretty exciting about this prospect because its also a step toward creating a common evidence index that will make file construction much easier and could possibly move debate past relying on Microsoft Word.

5. Local networks. The most common complaint about paperless debate is that it adds time to contest rounds because saving and jumping speeches is too slow. While I don’t believe this to be true (more likely its time shifted in debate --- from the waste of losing paper evidence on the floor), it’ll soon be fixed when local wireless networks become standard. Already, I understand the Liberty University has experimented successfully with creating networks for sharing evidence with computers in immediate proximity and it is one of my goals for UGA next year. With these in effect, virtual jumping becomes almost instantaneous and paperless will produce a clear net-reduction in the amount of time required to complete a debate.