This image is from an interactive Tiger test in today’s New York Times. It is a cool, interactive window in a NY Times online page. You can click either side to see a persuasive argument for two opposing points of view. In this case, the two sides are 1) Tiger Woods is the best athlete ever, and 2) Tiger is not the greatest athlete ever. After you click each of the sides and learn what the videos have to tell you, you can then vote.
As the Net matures and broadband allows more and more interaction, audio, and video, more and more possibilities open up for getting students thinking, and giving them knowledge in interesting ways. A format like the Tiger test could be a way to teach two opposing theories in history, or science, or literature.
Perhaps we could do poems, putting on one side: Walter Adolphe Roberts’ Tiger Lily and on the other side William Blake’s The Tiger. The dark side would clearly be Blake:
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
