{"id":4259,"date":"2011-08-15T23:53:20","date_gmt":"2011-08-15T23:53:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=4259"},"modified":"2011-08-16T00:14:53","modified_gmt":"2011-08-16T00:14:53","slug":"formats-for-civil-online-debate-i-inspired-by-the-talmud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=4259","title":{"rendered":"Formats for civil online debate I – inspired by the Talmud"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — hypertext, rhetoric, Talmud, civility ]<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

I have been thinking quite a bit recently about formats for online debate, and posted a comment<\/a> on Jean Goodwin<\/strong>‘s blog<\/a> yesterday, in which I commented on the Talmudic page (see R Eliezar Segal<\/strong>‘s excellent hypertext version<\/a> for an explanation of how it works). It’s a topic that has interested me since before the turn of the millennium, and one I’ve discussed and prototyped a bit in some of Howard Rheingold<\/strong>‘s class forums<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yesterday in my comment on JG’s blog, I said:<\/p>\n

My guiding principle here is that devising suitable forms may well elevate the content poured into them…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I said this because, in my view, constraint facilitates excellence<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Part of the key here is captured very nicely in this quote from Jean Toomer<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

In this multiple simultaneous world words only dole out one thing at a time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So we need polyphony, we need forms that capture many voices, many points of view, the perspectives of many stakeholders, simultaneously — not a linear progression from premise to conclusion.\u00a0 And since we’re talking argumentation here, this simultaneity can be captured in a graphical form, as in this diagram based on Toulmin<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"toulmin-example.gif\"<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*<\/p>\n

In that spirit, I thought I’d post a couple of my own experimental formats.\u00a0 The first is based fairly closely on the Talmudic page — and I put it together in March of this year, so things in Libya have moved along a bit since then, though not quite enough as yet:<\/p>\n

\"libyan-talmudsm.gif\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My second format is a variant on the “Dart Board” sometimes used for playing my HipBone Games<\/strong> (see, for instance, my solo game War is Sexy, says Dawn<\/a><\/em>).<\/p>\n

I shall present it in a follow up post of its own.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

For your convenience, here’s a blank template<\/strong> for the kind of Talmudic debate-page I used above, available for download.\u00a0 It can be filled with any graphical software that allows text and a choice of fonts & sizes.\u00a0 I recommend using larger type for the main text, medium for the commentary, and small print for annotations and footnotes:<\/p>\n

\"libyan-talmudsm-blank.png\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron — hypertext, rhetoric, Talmud, civility ] . I have been thinking quite a bit recently about formats for online debate, and posted a comment on Jean Goodwin‘s blog yesterday, in which I commented on the Talmudic page (see R Eliezar Segal‘s excellent hypertext version for an explanation of how it works). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,321,526,645,113,644,625,25,23,647,418,462,626,562,522,648,31,646,1,61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analytic","category-blogosphere","category-charles-cameron","category-counterpoint","category-framing","category-graphical-thinking","category-hipbone-analysis","category-horizontal-thinking","category-insight","category-libya","category-logic","category-metacognition","category-patterns","category-perception","category-questions","category-rheingold","category-synthesis","category-talmud","category-uncategorized","category-visualization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}