Tag Archives: the3nr

Announcing The 3NR Logo/T-Shirt Competition

As we near the one month mark since the founding of The 3NR, the site’s growth continues to impress—in the month of May, we averaged 719 visits per day (a total of 18,335 visits and counting). While our publishing schedule has lightened over the past few weeks, we remain committed to this site for the long-term. With NFL Nationals less than two weeks away and summer institutes gearing up to prepare students to debate next year’s poverty topic, we plan to publish a substantial amount of content during the upcoming summer months.

In hopes of better promoting the site, we are soliciting help from our readership. Please continue to spread the word about The 3NR to your friends and teammates; these word-of-mouth recommendations have been almost completely responsible for the growth in our audience, and for that we are profoundly appreciative.

In addition to publicizing the site, we are turning to our readers to create a logo for The3NR.com as well as T-shirt designs to promote the site. Basically, we need a cool logo and at least one cool T-shirt design. Unfortunately, our MS Paint and Photoshop skills leave much to be desired. It is up to you, dear readers, to make up for our shortcomings.

What are the rules? Submit as many logos and designs as you’d like by June 15th. At that time, we will decide the winning logo and T-shirt design(s). If you win, you will be credited with a shout-out on the site and will receive an assortment of prizes yet to be determined—probably a free shirt and some evidence, but we’ll figure that out later. To submit your logo or design, email Roy Levkovitz (see the About The Authors page).

If you haven’t done so already, you should also become a fan of The 3NR on Facebook. We will post updates about this contest on our Wall so that readers can follow along and provide feedback to designers.

Thanks for your continued support of The 3NR and good luck with your designs!

An Update On The3NR.com: Avatars, Comments, & Accounts

So far, so good. The3NR.com has received nearly 3,500 visits during its first six days of existence. We have posted eleven times and received 60 comments from more than ten visitors. And we haven’t really publicized this, yet.

In an attempt to make this site more user-friendly, I wanted to share a few things with our readers.

  1. We have enabled the use of gravatars. If you’d like an avatar to appear next to your name when you comment, simply visit the gravatar site, create an account, and select an avatar image. As long as you remain logged in, your gravatar will appear on The3NR.com as well as any other site that uses the service. Nifty, eh?

  2. In an attempt to prevent comment and trackback spam before it starts, we are using the Askimet spam prevention system. Unfortunately, it has incorrectly identified a few comments as spam and therefore required us to approve them. These false positives will decrease over time as the software learns from its mistakes. In the meantime, we will approve the pending comments as soon as we can. We have also added a captcha system that requires unregistered users to type in a few characters before submitting a comment; this will prevent bots from posting automated spam messages. Any inconvenience in the short term will hopefully be outweighed by the long-term benefits of preventing aggravating spam.

  3. To make things easier, we have enabled readers to register for an account with The3NR.com. If you are a frequent reader/contributor, this will allow you to post without worrying about the spam filter or the captcha system. Remember, you can also subscribe to the site via RSS and subscribe via email to the comments on an individual post (there is a link before you hit “submit” for a new comment that allows you to manage your comment subscription).

Thank you for your continued patronage of The3NR.com. Feel free to email any/all of us with comments or suggestions and please continue posting your thoughts on the articles… that’s why we’re writing.

Welcome to The3NR.com

This site is a collaboration between three debate coaches whose goal is to make a positive contribution to the high school debate community’s marketplace of ideas. As should be expected given our positions, all three of us are extremely opinionated and unafraid to share our perspectives about debate pedagogy and praxis with students and colleagues.

With three contributing authors, it is our hope that this blog will be frequently updated with content that high school debaters, judges, and coaches will find equal parts interesting and thought-provoking. In particular, we hope to spark discussions and debates about a wide range of issues of import to the high school debate community.

We do not always agree with one another; it is our hope that this will make The3NR.com a flashpoint for stimulating back-and-forths about debate that readers will find engaging. We welcome contributions from others, both in the form of comments and guest article submissions.

There are very few places on the internet where interested individuals can discuss the theory and praxis of high school policy debate: we hope that The3NR.com can fill this void and become a staple of every debater and coach’s web surfing routine.