The discussion about judge choice has been pretty interesting. To consolidate and improve the dicussion, I've created a new thread with a summary of my main responses to critics. Full read within.

Also - the picture I've chosen for this post has nothing to do with its content -- I just think its pretty sweet.

In the debate community, we are starting to see a substantial transition to paperless debate. Unfortunately, many people in the community think paperless wastes time, delays debates, and gives an unfair advantage to the paperless team. However, teams that debate with paper can easily use the advantages paperless debate offers to maximize their ability to win more debates. Since the transition to paperless is occurring so rapidly, it is necessary that debaters utilize the advantages that paperless offers to the opposing teams.

Oscar Handlin proffered this challenge over a half a century ago:  Our troubled planet can no longer afford the luxury of pursuits confined to an ivory tower.  Scholarship has to prove its worth, not on its own terms, but by service to the nation and the world.  As we experience what some have labeled the third academic revolution in American higher education, universities look to meet the increasing demands of political relevance and accountability (Bergstrom and Bullis, 1999, p. 25).   Current domestic public policy concerns include: an inferior educational experience for children in kindergarten through twelfth grade, a degraded environment, rural and urban poverty, inadequate health care, and a compromised Social Security System.

The intercollegiate debate program is an ideal vehicle to provide an engaged form of scholarship.  Service learning is an educational experience that affords students the opportunity to apply what is learned in formal academic environments in community settings. 

The introduction of paperless debating risks upsetting the current structure of reciprocal norm compliance as it creates new incentives for both paperless and paper teams to take actions that are in their favor at the detriment of their competitors.

I try to keep up with the ongoing digitization of offline research materials.  For debaters, this isn't such a big issue because of the premium placed on the recency of evidence.  But the dependence on Google News, regular search engines, and Lexis can cause debaters to miss important information.

In debates that take place between policy teams and project teams, one central sticking point tends to be over the merits of switch side debate in our activity. How do the goals of Project debating interact with the ideals and practices of what is commonly known as “switch side debate”?