Please Join the Faculty...

...in our summer reading.  Here is one of the articles we're reading this summer, in anticipation of your return.  The author, Mark Prensky, sees technology as becoming an "extension of our brains; it's a new way of thinking."  In what ways do you see this in your own learning, your own lives?  What ideas in the article ring true to you?  Which seem less applicable, obvious, or other?  Are there ways you would appreciate seeing this approach implemented at SBS?  How and why?  Before you sit down to dinner on Sunday, please answer these questions and others that the article raises for you.  Along the way, share two or more Knowledge Questions extracted from the text and your relationship to its ideas.

Did You See That Coming?

As we move into summer's final month, you are no doubt deep into writing your Extended Essays.  I have always found writing an illuminating form of investigation, no matter how certain I am of my subject at the outset.  Share with us, please, a moment of discovery, of redefinition, of shifting perspective, of surprising connection, from your writing and thinking and learning process.  Give us a bit of context (your topic, your final research question, and how this moment fits into the work as a whole), explain the moment, and then offer a Knowledge Question that incorporates a way of knowing.  Please post before you eat dinner on Sunday.  I will write to you next from the shores of Lake Huron.

Taste this Ringtone

Why do I love wasabi?  Why does my wife hate water chestnuts?  Why does the sound of chewing bother me when nails on a chalk board doesn't?  As I regularly do, this morning I opened up the new xkcd and found this (when you read it, mouse over the panel and read the annotation, too).   This reminded me of an article I read this weekend.  Please read and reflect on both these texts, relate them to some other moment in your world, and connect them via a KQ, specifying a way of knowing along the way.  Please post by lunch time on Saturday.  Then find something tasty for lunch.

All the News that Fits

Where are you now?  Take a look at the world around you and share what catches your eye.  Select a relatively local news story and share a link to it as the beginning of your post for this week.  Think and write a bit about the perspectives and assumptions that the article contains and finish things off with a KQ related to perspective and ways of knowing in the article.  Please post these by Sunday local dinner time.

I Once Was Blind But Now Can Click and Drag

Every few months, a different friend of mine posts a link to this sliding scale of the universe, which you've seen before (and will surely enjoy again)--the most recent just this week.  This latest resharing led me to wonder anew about the site's appeal, and reminded me of this incredible journey.  As the title suggests, click and drag on the last, largest frame of the comic.  Make sure you have some free time before you begin.  For Saturday, please patiently explore these wells of perspective.  Find and note moments of cross-over (perhaps open both, each in its own window...).  Describe what you find, how your shifting and expanding perspective develops your understanding of the whole (as you know it), and, you guessed it, extract a knowledge question.  Please post by local noon on Saturday 6 June.

Inconstant Context

Philosophy comes in many forms.  This week, spend a little time in the funny pages.  Please consider these two comics from Nietzsche Family Circus, a site that randomly pairs Family Circus cartoons and Friedrich Nietzsche quotes: On Truth and On Judgments.  For each, consider the implications of the scene depicted, the meanings of the quotation, and the ways each is changed by their pairing.  Compose a knowledge question derived from each.  Please post your thoughts by Saturday at noon local time.

Billions and Billions of Links

Science and religion are often seen as at odds with one another, even as mutual threats.  Not so, says Carl Sagan. This week, please read the article, found on the amazing Brain Pickings (newly added to the links at right), and consider the overlapping ways of knowing implied by Sagan's proposed symbiosis.  As you read, follow at least two of the embedded links and read what you find there.  For your post, please share your thoughts on what you've read: what new ideas did you encounter?  With what questions are you left?  With what do you disagree and why?  How might your responses be shaped by your perspective and in what significant ways is it different from Sagan's?  Let the cherry on your post be a knowledge question encompassing two ways of knowing.  Your post is due by noon (in your local time zone) on Saturday, June 22.  Welcome to summer.

May the Spearth Be With You

Take a moment to think back through your Spearth Day.  What did you learn?  What new perspective did you gain?  Where are your blisters?  Share a moment, examine the perspectives it and you offer, and extract a knowledge question.  Then, for more perspective, spend some time here.  Please do this for Tuesday morning.

Thinking with the Stars

For Tuesday morning, please choose a moment from last night--either Formal Dinner or the IB Dance presentation--and examine the knowledge contained therein.  Explain the context, the perspectives at work, and what about it caught your mind's eye.  Finish with a KQ extracted from the moment.  Congratulations to those of you who danced last night.  Your performances were brave, personal, and powerful.

Think from the Spleen

Thank you for your thoughtful considerations of ways of knowing.  I though we made great headway in our work to understand faith in particular and feel poised to do likewise with instinct.  In the mean time, would you please use your next post to investigate intuition?  Begin by writing a working definition, then determine whether it is a discrete way of knowing or a combination of others.  Explain your justifications for your decision.  Finally, detail the ways of knowing you employed to arrive at your conclusions.  I have absolute faith that you can do this. Prove me right by Thursday morning.

Stretch the Net, Tighten Your Grasp

As you continue to hone your Knowledge Question composition skills, let's search farther afield for their sources.  For Tuesday morning (30 April), please find a moment of knowledge that you do not yet fully comprehend.  You needn't limit yourself to instances of rational, academic confusion; if emotion is a way of knowing, mustn't it also be a way of not yet knowing?  In working, then, to understand this knowledge moment, work also to understand the nature of its components.  In so doing, relate that moment of newly acquired knowledge (with which you may still be wrestling) to another in a different area of knowledge.  Then, you guessed it, document the entire process in a post that culminates in a Knowledge Question.  Remember in your documentation to consider the ways the process was shaped by your role as the unique knower.

Hello KQ my old friend...

Today I'd like you to go on a hunt for thinky awesomeness.  Please follow the links below--one is an old friend and two are shiny new toys--and see what you can find, create, assemble, or compute.  Ultimately, please choose a direction on one site, link to or describe how you got there, and extract a knowledge question from that virtual moment.  Please write this post by Tuesday morning at 8.
Here are the links:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

http://www.taggalaxy.com/

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/

How are you Thinking?

Let’s work together to explore some of the major philosophical schools of thought.  For 8 am Tuesday, please pick one item from the list below.  For your post, research the school of thought and provide a synthesized overview.  Include central tenets, prominent practitioners, developers, and perhaps detractors and their arguments.  It would also be helpful if you presented a representative argument as a form of object lesson for us, your pupils. We will use class on Tuesday and your next post to practice applying these philosophies to different situations, examining ourselves as philosophical knowers and ferreting out the resultant knowledge questions.

Schools from which to choose (no doubling up): Empiricism, Rationalism, Structuralism, Existentialism, Skepticism, Romanticism, Stoicism.

Researching Research

Intrepid Extend Essay writers: for Tuesday, please interview a senior IB diploma candidate about her process in researching and writing her extended essay.  In your discussion, explore the following aspects of her work:

• What approaches worked well, and which were dead-ends?
• The next time she embarks on such a project, what would she do differently?  Consider schedule and time management, her approach, other.
• What about the adventure was most rewarding, most challenging, most frustrating?

Again, your conversation should focus on the process rather than the product.  Take notes as you talk and listen, and come to class ready to share and consider what you've discovered.   I would like each of you to meet with a different senior, thus affording us a broad collective base of knowledge. Happy hunting.

Now Presenting...Free Will!

In addition to emailing me a time outside of our class periods when we might meet to discuss your presentation, please prepare the following before said meeting:

• One or more real world situations
• One or more Knowledge Questions for each real world situation
• One or more ideas for possible formats for your presentation

In the meantime, and since our next two class times will be devoted to planning meetings, please read this article on the nature and importance of free will.  For Friday morning (I know, it's usually for Thursday) please extract one KQ and identify two ways of knowing referred to or employed in the article.  Whether you want to or not.

They're Out There...They're Everywhere

Please use this post to share Knowledge Questions from your daily life.  Troll the halls for moments of knowledge, identify the situation that prompted your thinking, and extract a first-rate KQ.  Please share two for Thursday morning.  Happy fishing!

The Empty Toll Booth, or, Be Your Own Lemming

Now that we've begun our head-long dash down the path of Knowledge Questions, stop and regroup a bit for Thursday.  Read this guide to Knowledge Issue Extraction, then read two articles from 3 Quarks Daily or Arts and Letters Daily (links to which are on the right under TOK Links) and write a post that contains a) a real-word situation; b) a weak knowledge issue; c) a strong knowledge issue from each article.  Be sure to indicate from which article each situation and KI comes.

Man Helps Dog Bite Victim

You'll know it when you see it, right?  For next time, please find, share here, and explain one example for each of the following terms: consistent, inconsistent, valid, invalid, and ambiguous.  Your examples should either be published or overheard (no fair setting the stage).  If the latter you may use pseudonyms.

For tomorrow, toddle off to Oxford and work through this logic tutorial on consistency and validity.  Once on the site, follow the Tutorials link, then select Tutorial One.  Continue until you finish Exercise 1.4.  Having completed this, consider (in writing) how the skills this tutorial develops help you understand and tackle the puzzles and paradoxes from the previous post.

Logic--Huh! Good God! What is it good for?

Setting aside ontological arguments for the moment, let's begin to sharpen our logic skills.  For Tuesday, please tackle these logic puzzles.  Work patiently and with a pencil, reasoning out the consequences of each statement and, where appropriate, its speaker.  In your post examine the ways your thinking changed or developed to accommodate this task.  What was most difficult?  How did you arrive at the answers?  If you get angry at logic, take a break and read this.

What if they held a blog party and nobody posted?

We've begun to define the course together and as your last posts show, you have a strong grasp of the ways we are thinking and approaching both issues and knowledge.  For Thursday morning, let's all take Jane's advice: post a question that you would like us to tackle together.  Delve into your bags of thinky awesomeness and pull out a stumper.  We'll chew on some of them together on Thursday and use that process as a way of beginning our relationship with formal logic.

There's Something Happening Here

What it is ain't exactly clear.  For Tuesday, please write a one paragraph (approximately 500 characters) course description for TOK.  Think about what we do, how we do it, and why we're here (in the course, not in existence.  That's a different course).  If you wish, this could also be an opportunity to suggest reshapings of the course: describe what it is and what it could or should be.

Only Uncertainty Is Certain

For your first post in our consideration of Experimental Science as a way of knowing, please transcribe your science quotation, then provide a close reading of the text, along the lines of our group work from today.  Patiently follow your ideas to their ends, and embrace multiplicity of meaning.  Do this writing for Thursday morning.  For next Tuesday, please read and respond to the post below yours from the first round (if you are the final poster from the first round, respond to the first post).  Augment your classmate's reading with your own analysis, both of the text she provides and of her close reading.  Critique, refute, reinforce, explore.  We will pick up the discussions in our next classes.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane...

Taking the wonderful Colossal as your source, choose an exhibit in which the artist employs some form of creative re-tasking: the use of an object, idea, pattern, material in a way other than that for which it was originally intended.  Consider in your writing the ways that your knowledge of the medium's original purpose influences your understanding of the piece(s) the artist has created.  Please come to class ready to discuss the work you select, and paste a link to the work into your post (if you click on the title of the article in question you will be redirected to a discrete page).

Who's In Charge Here?

Let's think about free will (follow this for a new reading) and how we choose (you'll need an hour for this one).  Do some writing for Tuesday morning in which you reflect on the decisions you make in the process of decoding these implications.  NB: you're writing about your observations of the ways you are thinking, not just what you are thinking.  To what extent are your understandings decisions that you control?  Are you in command of the knowledge that you create?