This article appeared in the May 2007 Rostrum.
Waves of the future come and go; sometimes they become the annoyances of the present, and sometimes they become the “What where they thinking?” of the past. Computers have always fascinated people as all three: as thinking machines, they have the kind of potential we imagine ourselves to have. As bug ridden crashing beasts of frustration, they make life more interesting at the worst possible moments: “Oh god, the computer just deleted Round 4 of Varsity LD!”. And as the center of investment speculation, they certainly are good at creating one economic bubble after another, as business people forget that economies rely on profit, not buzzwords.
Any computer project requires planning and consideration. Education professionals, though rarely actual teachers, have often tried to just shove them into a curriculum without considering where they best fit. Blindly tossing laptops around a curriculum ultimately harms education; they’ll inevitably make some parts of a curriculum harder to learn, given insufficient planning and foresight. So, on reading Rami Hernandez’s article in the March Rostrum advocating use of not only computers, but also internet connections in limited prep and debate events, I have to wonder if computers aren’t being pushed forward because they’re shiny and nominally easier, not because they’d actually make better speakers and debaters of our students.
Tales of ancient times: 1995
Computers have already had their impact on forensics. Extemp’s changed a great deal in the short (though distressingly growing) time between my brief extemp career, and my current students’ time. Just a decade ago, we cut our files out newspapers and magazines, column inch by painful column inch. The files were not neat stacks of printouts, but little wisps of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time and its ilk, and most useful but terrifying of all, the Economist. Nothing could strike fear in a novice extemper’s heart so profoundly as being forced to cut the Economist. We were convinced some British production editor was onto us, clairvoyantly knowing we would be mangling the layout into small snippets of knowledge, filed by category. This mythic, sinister editor responded by placing each story on portions of three pages, with sometimes a single paragraph dropping surrounded by three other stories on the same page. Did our copy machines ever get a workout. And our scissors. And staplers. And above all, our fingers. Paper cuts, scissor wounds, broken fingernails from removing staples; we sacrificed pints of blood and numerous digits just to get that one article about Uruguay from the Financial Times. Life was tough. I imagine it was tougher still, before the advent of the cheap Xerox, and even earlier, when extemp files were carved in clay in cuneiform; the weight alone must have been staggering.
Then, around seven or so years ago, Lexis/Nexis and came and swept all that away. I did not exactly weep. Now instead of sitting on the floor with a pair of scissors and some dim hope, students create their own list of current events, sit down at the computer, do a few searches, and let the laser printer do the rest. Neat stacks, no cutting, and they’re already sorted by topic. Take that, you fiendish Economist production editor!
Now, I’m all for the ease, not that I file anymore myself. That ease, however, was not without a cost; a change in the event itself.
Italy did what?
Do we have more sources in our files? Oh, yes, and they’re very obsessively neat, I might add. Every year at least one upperclassmen becomes a total fascist about file organization, and woe to the disorganized novice who stands between them and the Platonic ideal of tub perfection. No doubt, our files are infinitely better, with less time spent on them to boot. But here’s the real kicker: does all that make my students better extempers?
That’s a much harder question to answer. For one, the chances that my students will miss filing some news event has increased. Say, for instance, Italy happened to suddenly vanish in 1995. I would imagine the magazines I used to cut would have mentioned this event prominently. A brief scan of the front cover of Newsweek would have prompted the immediate creation of a file entitled “Italy: Missing”. Today, if an extemper has a busy week and misses the news, they may run their normal online searches, and call it a day. The world being one Italy short might be unnoticed until the following Saturday, which for some reason has a round all about Italy.
My example is unlikely, perhaps, but the phenomenon is not uncommon. I saw one extemper assert quite vigorously that Saddam Hussein remained in power as the President of Iraq, proving US sanctions ineffective. This would have been a fair point, had not a huge blazing war intervened and deposed Hussein three months prior. How do you miss a war, one our own country fought? I really can’t imagine. Sure, a novice can make a bad mistake, you say? This particular speech was during a semifinal round at Atlanta NFL Nationals in 2003.
The Sourcing Arms War
Extemp certainly sounds more impressive these days; a student can stand up there and rattle off 8-10 sources, from Seattle to Miami, Boston to San Diego, with a little Singapore Straits-Times and perhaps Le Monde thrown in for international flair. Is it more impressive, however, than the 4-8 we used to cram into a speech? I doubt it, for two reasons.
First, I believe the quality of students’ use of those sources has declined. I do not give credit to extempers who invoke the Houston Chronicle to inform me that the President’s name is George Bush, or those who cite the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s astounding insight that homeless people lack a place to live. But judges, both new and experienced, are often impressed by the fact that a student spouted out nine — nine! — articles in a single speech. Nine isn’t even that spectacular anymore; I’ve counted speeches well into the teens. Only further reflection, and careful notes, will reveal that few of those citations actually touched on points central to the speech’s analysis. I do take good notes, which also reveals another pattern — four newspaper articles by four different local papers on the same date were cited. Gosh, do they all say the same thing by chance, or is the student merely citing the same AP newswire article four different times? Students feel they have to keep up with their competition, and will find some way — any way — to get above that seven source mark.
Ever Grayer Ethical Areas
Those methods might be analytically unsound, and dangerous if a judge is paying attention. There are more insidious side effects as well. I, for instance, happen not to believe that students’ memories have grown more impressive with their files. The human brain can only keep so many facts & bits in short term memory. Inevitably then, inaccurate sourcing has proliferated.
Flubbing a source can be innocent: a student may indeed have a source that says what she quotes, but she gets the date or the title of the source wrong. That is against the rules of the activity, but most tournament directors, myself included, would have a hard time disqualifying a student for cheating who cited the Washington Post when the source was in fact the New York Times. But what if it were the New York Post, a paper with significantly less credibility? What if their inaccurate dating obscured the “cite the same AP story four times” trick I mentioned above? Where do you draw the line? Do you try to guess the students’ intent?
At the Yale Invitational in 2006, we ran a source check of every round of extemp in the quarterfinal round. Yale students took notes in each section, and afterwards asked each speaker to produce 3-4 of those sources. We set a very low bar; if a student had any source on any date that said something like what they cited, it was passed. If they didn’t, it was referred to a panel of three tournament officials, who then delivered rather lenient rulings on whether the citation constituted cheating.
Of the 24 students in the round, 5 were referred to the panel of officials, and 2 were unable to produce the material they cited at all. If we applied a strict standard, by the letter of the rule, it is likely we could have held the final right after the quarter, with the only students left standing. We had no wish to be ogres about it. We only wanted to demonstrate something, and set a precedent.
Yale will continue to run the source check in future years, and other tournaments I manage will follow suit. I encourage other tournaments to look into doing the same. Without a check, students face no accountability for they say. The pressure to add that one more article, that one more source, to sound just a bit more impressive will only grow. Unless we check up on our students, the incentives are entirely aligned towards frivolous and even inaccurate sourcing; and that’s ultimately bad for our activity.
Whither Wireless Laptops
Now that I’ve stated all this, what does any of it have to do with Rami Hernandez’s article? It demonstrates a case of unintended consequences. In this case, there’s no real way to ban sources from online engines from the prep room, nor would I want to. But, their use has changed the event in a negative way. That merits a response, unless we don’t care much about honesty in Extemp.
Technology is a tool, not a moral force. I’m no luddite; it’s a tool I use every day. I’m not a full time teacher or coach; by day I am the IT manager for a biotech company, Gene Network Sciences. We use computer simulations to try to speed up new drug discoveries. In other words, we’re trying to cure cancer using computers. I hope we succeed, and not just for my stock options. So I’m perfectly content with the idea that computers can be Good Things. I further believe that every student in high school should be taught computing at a high level, including programming; in some ways, you can only truly use a computer when you can write code.
However, that doesn’t mean computers need to invade every aspect of education. There are no silver bullets in life, and computers are no exception. They are limited tools, and won’t improve every aspect of students’ growth. They’re stunning tools when you’re answering math and science questions, but they’re miserable in trying to figure out which questions to ask. Their word processing powers have saved me gallons of white-out, but they have yet to give me one good opening line for a story or essay.
Worse speeches now, better learning later
Computers might well be helpful in constructing an extemp speech, that’s not really what forensics is about, is it? We’re not aiming here for the Perfect Extemp Speech; if it were art of perfection we were after, we could do better than to start with 15 year olds nervous about speaking in public. But it’s teaching we’re after, not perfection. If we allow laptops, internet or no, into the prep room, we will have removed one of the key limits of extemp.
Students are limited not only by their 30 minutes, but they’re also limited to a certain number of files. Some teams lug more than others, but on the whole, the number of files by any given student at nationals is roughly the same; airline restrictions and muscle power impose a ceiling. With laptop storage, that logic is blown away; my little 5 1/2 pound MacBook Pro holds around 120GB of material. I haven’t done the math, but I imagine that it could hold more text than the entire contents of all the tubs at Nationals, in both USX and IX. If it can’t, then I can build a computer that would, and it would be smaller than a single tub.
If my kids were equipped with such a beast, they would longer need to choose, and thus to think, about what they bring. Why not have a file on the Moldovan economy? Why be aware that France’s presidential election is in the news this month, while the Mexican presidential controversy has slowed down and can probably be culled? Just toss it all in! And while we’re at it, why bother reading the articles anyway, before filing them?
That last line shows the danger. Now, one might argue that a student who wants to do well won’t skip the reading part if they know what’s good for them, and I would agree. However, part of the deal of being an educator is that students often don’t know what’s good for them, and it’s our job to nudge them towards it anyway. If we strip away the limit, and therefore the thought and decision making that goes into constructing a set of files, we take away an incentive to think.
Google cannot think for you
Students may all have access to a laptop soon, but every student already has access to a vastly faster database with processing power and memory unmatched by any modern computer. It’s called a brain, and it’s what we’re out to exercise here. I like to say that the best extempers will be the ones who know how they are going to answer a question before they select the topic at draw. Students can only pull that trick after years of practice, reading and familiarity with the topic.
Even if they could research the same information from databases and the Web given mere seconds more, it won’t be the same. Command of information in your mind allows you to make connections, insights and form creative ideas that no computer database search can. If you don’t know the information in the first place, these connections can never be made for you. Even Google will fall short.
How does a student build that skill? Part of preparing for extemp is building that sort of mental store of ideas and data. Extemp throws students into uncertain situations, where the questions may or may not be on topics they know. Topics may also be on an unexpected aspect of a familiar topic area. In either case, students have to apply their limited files to these new ideas. That challenge encourages mental self-reliance, and growth.
Students learn to rely on their own mental connections. If the answer is just a Google away, however, students may never figure out how powerful their own minds can be. It’s not about the answer, after all, it’s about teaching students the process of figuring it out. To draw a coarse analogy, we may have had calculators for decades now, but that does not change the worth of knowing how to add or multiply in your head. Technology is fast, but in the long run students are served by learning how to get that answer themselves.
If we allow net connections in prep room, incentives to build that knowledge fall away. The internet can be too easy sometimes, and that is a danger of our digital age and education. I think students should know how to use the internet, to be sure. They also need to preserve their fundamental skills of quick thinking, analysis and creativity, which are things that computers can not only not help, but actively harm.
Ultimately then, I don’t think the internet has a place in the prep room. What the students bring there should be limited. That’s not incompatible with the convenience of using laptops, but requires more thought and care. And most of all, research time should not be confused with prep time; we need to simultaneously encourage students to do good research and careful choices ahead of time, and also teach them to rely on their own analytic powers and insights when a new situation comes up, rather than running instantly for their nearest search engine.
Embracing the future
So if we’re truly anxious about being left behind, the solution is not to embrace fully whatever the next wave of the future may be. After all, computer literacy is only one educational goal among many; if acquiring computer skills is the purpose of every lesson, than many other educational purposes will suffer as a consequence.
So instead of embracing the putative wave of the future headlong, we need to as a community think through the implications of technology, and use it where it helps directly reach our goals of educating the students, while keeping it from becoming the way to do well while avoiding learning. Sometimes that requires our students to be less perfect today. That is a price we can easily bear, if we end up with stronger thinkers and sharper speakers at the end of the process.
