I’m teaching a college course on rhetoric and argumentation this spring that will have an on-line discussion forum. I want to set up some links to places on the net where rules of arguentation and evidence are generally observed, as in the SDMB. My goal is that they observe the unhindered exchange of intelligence, wit, style, imagination and logic that is the soul of civilized intellectual discourse.
The problem is that there aren’t many such places (And I also don’t know how to look).
Anybody care to add to my scanty list of “places on the web where debate is conducted civilly and with intelligence?”
I’m looking for non-academic sites-- it’s a freshman class.
Well, NLZero attempts it, and like SD succeeds in its own way.
The mix of people is quite different.
It used to be BIX (the Byte Magazine Information Exchange), I believe the first great Board. Somehow BIX got shut down and the name locked down, but users continued on NLZero.
http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/index.php . This is an astronomy site, the main focus being bad astronomy portrayed in media, and the respective good astronomy. There are a number of fora for topics, including one dedicated to answering the Apollo Hoax topic. It is generally a good place, with most regulars well-behaved, and logic and argumentation are much preferred over whining and mindless complaints.
And if you send your students there, you’ll simultaneously be fighting the ignorance of the Apollo Hoax phenomenon and that stupid Fox program. Plus, they can learn some history in disguise.
Thanks, guys. Bad Astronomy is a bit more topic-specific than I was looking for but still useful, and NL Zero appears to be a pay site. But Randi and junkscience look great.
Any more?
And CK I keep trying to ditch the SDMB, but … Well, note my registration date…
Our own Opalcat started a site a few years back and it is, in my mind at least, the closest thing to SDMB without being SDMB (unlike our Hong Kong clone).
