Please Extend an Invitation to Know

As we reach midsummer, share with one another, please, a moment of knowledge from your Extended Essay work and the unexpected way you have connected it to another area of your life.  In order, then: what interesting, challenging, surprising, frustrating instance of intellectual inquiry are you sharing? By what process or path have you grappled with same? How did it resonate elsewhere in your life?  What is the knowledge question that connects these moments?  Also, check this out (sit down first).

The Same But Different

We are all familiar with metaphors--their uses, their forms, their power--and so I wonder if they offer a familiar way to effectively master the Knowledge Question.  Please begin by considering Dr. Wheeler's definition of metaphor, paying particular attention to the quote from Aristotle. Next, please revisit this excellent explanation of how to extract knowledge issues, especially germane given the recent boson news.  Select a metaphor from your surroundings (summer reading? Extended Essay? Anyone?) and consider the ways in which it leads you to extract and transpose your knowledge.  Your post should reflect your careful reflection on all of the above.

Take a Stab at Color

This week, let's keep thinking about perspective in such a way as to reconnect with our neuroscience past, considering the interplay of mind and physics.  Listen, please, to this Radiolab podcast.  Consider the ways you the knower are also you the seer.  What is the relationship between your two roles?  Write about this.  Also, please extract a knowledge issue from the podcast and transpose it to a moment of knowledge in your own life (not an imagined one).  Remember, this does not mean a moment in which you also investigate color: drop the content.

Weighing In on Scale

In the middle of the transition to summer, to a changing role at SBS, the anticipation of my sister's wedding, and my impending age mile stone, I find myself thinking about the powerful effects of perspective.  In accepting my implicit invitation to join in this reflection, please take two steps before writing: consider this incredible sliding scale; choose an aspect of your life and examine the ways you have considered it differently from different places.  For local noon on Friday 29 June, please write about the effects of perspective on you the knower.  While shifts in perspective over time are powerful and important, focus instead here on those shifts brought on by changes in your location.  As the link suggests, "closer" and "farther" are different locations.

A Very Good Place To Start

Greetings Knowers and happy summer. When we were last together, the big ideas were flying fast and furious, as were the hugs and roses. With a week's perspective (or amnesia) under your belt, please revisit Mia's speech. Extract a knowledge question from the speech and connect it to another moment of knowledge from your own life. This writing is due Friday 22 June at noon (in your time zone).

They're Everywhere

As you finish term projects and prepare for exams, be on the lookout for interesting ways of knowing.  For Friday, please describe an instance to which you then apply the question "does knowledge, including culture, depend on language?"  For Monday, build on the observation and analysis of a classmate; extract a knowledge issue from another's Friday post and connect it to a separate moment of knowledge of your own.  You may even wish to view the moment through an Andersonian lens.

How Can I Help?

On the heels of Sonia's powerful and impressive senior project presentation last night, I would like us to consider the difficult conflict of idealism and practicality.  As Emilie highlighted with her question for Sonia, there are limitations and challenges in the delivery of aid of any sort.

For Friday, please think carefully and write thoroughly about these questions: What should one do in the face of a genuinely needy child applying for help in the guise of an orphan?  In this case, we reach the intersection of emotion and reason, empathy and mathematics.  How do we reconcile these ways of knowing?  Is there an objective ethical answer?  In responding, please consider yourself as the knower.  What experiences and perspectives from your life contribute to your response?

For Monday, identify and examine another instance of the intersection of reason and emotion.  Consider anew how it should be handled and how you know.

There Are Two Errors in the the Title of This Post

Let's continue our logical immersion.  For Friday, 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?

For Monday, journey to reasonable old England 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 the puzzles above.

I Didn't Know the Question was Loaded

Picking up on our discussion of strawmen and their ilk, and as a way of reinforcing our commitment to explicitly stating that which we mean and wish to convey, please read (and perhaps carry with you) this wonderful list of logical fallacies.  For Friday morning (and then again for Monday morning) please notice, record, and categorize a logical fallacy in action.  Your comment should include the quoted text of the fallacy, the type, and an explanation of what makes it that type.  In the interest of kindness and good will, please only identify the speaker if she or he is a public figure; this is an exercise in critical thinking, not public shame.  The two fallacies you identify must come from two different sources and be of two different sorts.  Also before next time please revise your Design and Research comment to reflect our class discussion.

Designing Research, Researching Design

With the discourse of the MIT panel and its impressive audience still firmly in our minds, please do some thinking and writing about Design and Research (as opposed to a search).  For Monday morning, formulate and share your definitions of these two terms.  Also, share your thoughts on whether the two are necessarily distinct.  Is there overlap?  Are the distinctions you draw necessary or convenient?  How so, and if the latter, what purpose does the distinction serve?  In other words, what is the role of the knower?  As a possible starting point, here are the aspects of research as defined by Warren Seering (who, I was thrilled to see, lists design as a research interest):
1. Study the designer
2. Examine the design artifact (eg. the house)
3. Understand the methods of understanding
4. Define the tools (CAD, the hammer, etc.)

Pain is How Your Brain Says "Thank You"

For next Monday morning (which is one week before our next class on May 7), please find a moment of knowledge that you do not yet fully comprehend.  In working, then, to understand it, work also to understand the nature of its components (as with velocity and acceleration).  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.

I Know how you Feel

For Friday morning, please post your EE research question and an associated knowledge question, then do the same for the next research question on the list I sent you.  Remember to craft KQs that are not content specific.  Feel free to collaborate on this process.
For Monday, let's continue our discussion of emotion as a way of knowing.  Watch this video of Jane Elliot's experiment in discrimination.  How does emotion shape the ways we define and use the lessons of this piece?  Next, watch this skit from the first season of Saturday Night Live, in which a job interviewer (Chevy Chase) administers a word association test to a prospective employee (Richard Pryor).  What makes this skit funny?  How are your emotions manipulated?  To what extent does it rely on certain assumptions about the audience's morality? [a word of caution: the language in this skit is, necessarily, strong]  At the end of your comment, please write a knowledge question derived from one of the videos.

He's so haole he doesn't even know he's haole

For Monday morning, in the context of Peggy McIntosh's article, consider your own knapsack.  In what different settings of your life do you have advantages and disadvantages?  To what degrees are they unspoken, unacknowledged?  What might you do to level the playing field?  Is it possible to increase the power and privilege of one group without a reciprocal lessening of the advantaged group?  In addition to your comments, please extract and post one knowledge question from the article.  Here's the source of this week's title: a clip from North Shore.

Eracing (sic) Knowledge

Let us begin with the assumption that we respect and value one another despite (and indeed because of) our differences.  What if one or more of those differences disappeared?  And what if that disappearance was the result of a conceptual change rather than a change in those that we see as different?  Before you return, refreshed and reinvigorated by break, please read this article and post a comment reflecting on the ideas therein and on your own responses.  Does this information change the way you view race?  What is the relationship between genetic makeup and views on race?  Between facts and their implications and our assessment of objectivity (our own and others')?
Please complete your first post by the morning of Monday 26 March.  By 8am on the following Monday (2 April, our next class day), please respond to one another's comments and compose a Knowledge Question that applies to the article.  Thanks and have a wonderful March.  Oh, and if you find yourself running low on awesome spend a little time here.

Questions We Hope Remain Irrelevant

• To what extent will the incompleteness theorem apply to your Extended Essay?
• As every human is shaped by experience and influence, can an Extended Essay be original?
• Does the unknowable inspire significant Extended Essays?

 For next week's class (1/24), please read chapters 1-3 in the IB Extended Essay book (pp1-21).  In class, Ms. Durrett will present an overview of the EE and get you started on the first step: brainstorming your proposed subject areas.  Bring thoughts and questions.  Bring your book, too.

Also, next week you will present an overview of what you learned through interviewing your chosen person about his/her own research project, so come with your notes and be prepared to synthesize your conversation and reflections.

Because I know you all read and loved the last one, here's another of my favorite Browning monologues, this one creepier than the last.

Finally, congratulations to you all on your first round of presentations.  You thought and spoke with bravery and grace; I learned a tremendous amount and was led to connections I would not otherwise have approached.

Formalizing Your Curiousity

As we discussed in class, and as your handout details, for next time please schedule, prepare for, complete, and take notes on your interview with the member of the faculty or staff you have selected.  Remember that this interview should focus on the process and methods of research, not the subject matter.  Please bring your notes to our next class.
Congratulations to tonight's presenters, and happy extended preparation (as needed) to next week's.  In the meantime, enjoy one of my favorite dramatic monologues by Robert Browning.  Also consider this article on the father of geology, and consider the ramifications of the fossils-are-rocks-that-fell-from-the-moon theory which preceded Steno's work.

Ghostrider has the Ball

In preparation for your January presentations, please select a text (which need not be text) that will yield weighty Knowledge Questions (formerly known as Knowledge Issues). Before A period Monday morning, please post a link to your text as a comment.  In your hunt, remember your three closest allies (all found to the right): 3quarksdaily, RadioLab, and Arts and Letters Daily.

In the meantime, enjoy this serendipitous article from the Paris Review (via Old Faithful) with special appreciation for Ralph Ellison's contribution to our discussion of the symbolic nature of language.

Can You Help a Knower Out?

For Friday, please find a link that will inspire Knowledge Issues.  Post the link to the article in Comments, along with a brief introduction to the piece.
For Tuesday, follow the link posted under (after) yours, then post two knowledge issues that you extract from the piece.

If I'm not my Brain, Who Is?

For Friday, please complete your critique and revision of your classmate's Knowledge Issues and email same to her.  For Monday, fortified by the understanding this critique provides, please compose two KIs for the article on Embodied Cognition and post them here in Comments.  Beyond that, good luck on exams, and remember to check back before Thanksgiving for your vacation fun.

Do you know what I mean?

With thanks to Larry Ferlazzo and his excellent blog, via Bill Ivey and his excellent emails, please read and respond to the following for Friday.

Review these links on knowledge issues. Please takes notes and respond in the comments section, using these prompts as your non-limiting guide:

1) What is a knowledge issue?

2) What are key ideas to remember when you are trying to write one?

3) Write two or three knowledge issues.

4) Which resource was the best in helping you understand knowledge issues, and why?

Knowledge issues, knowers and knowing

What is a knowledge issue?

How do I formulate my own Knowledge Issues for a presentation?

Extracting Knowledge Issues

How do I evaluate/ analyse knowledge issues?

Now let's hone those Knowledge Issue skills: read through the articles and watch the video found via the five new links at the top of the "TOK LINKS" list on the right.  Choose two of the links, and derive two KIs from each (for a total of four).  Post them in comments for Tuesday morning; please indicate from which article each KI comes.

The Issue in Question

Let us begin where we ended.  For Friday, please repost the scientific snippet on which your classmate has written.  Then critique, refute, reinforce, and explore both the quotation and your colleague's close reading.  In the same way we did in class, identify the questions of knowledge at play, and evaluate them.  Plan your writing and craft your thoughts.  Be careful; be exact.

For Tuesday, I invite you (without the possibility of demurral) to explore and share your thoughts on the IB experience thus far.  Please write 600-800 words about how the IB has impacted your life.  It’s early, I know, but it’s never too early to reflect.  This is a formal piece of writing, as the structure, diction, and syntax should reflect.  Be careful, be exact, be honest.  Before class, please email me your essay as an attachment, and bring a printed copy to class.

She Blinded Me With Science

For your first post in our consideration of Experimental Science as a way of knowing, please transcribe your quotation snippet, then provide a close reading of the text.  Patiently follow your ideas to their ends, and embrace multiplicity of meaning.  For Tuesday, please choose a classmate's post, and respond to her reading with your own analysis, both of the text she provides and of her close reading.  Critique, refute, reinforce, explore.  Only one response per Friday post, please; thus each point will have a counterpoint.

Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”

-Pablo Picasso

“Art renders accessible to [those] of the latest generations all the feelings experienced by their predecessors and also those felt by their best and foremost contemporaries...[Art] is a means of union...joining [people] together in the same feeling. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by those feelings and also experience them...A real work of art destroys in the consciousness of the recipient the separation between himself and the artist, and...also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.”

-Leo Tolstoy

For Friday:

In one of your other classes, find a lie that makes you realize a truth. Identify the feelings with which it infects you, and consider the nature of your knowledge. Is it subjective? Can it be both subjective and universal?

For Tuesday:

Is there a moment of universal truth described in Friday's comments with which you take issue (where you think the knower plays a subjective role)? How and why would the experience be different for you? Which of the ways of knowing come into play, and how?

The Role of the Knower: An Exercise in Contrast

For Friday, please reflect on the text below.  Your writing should include—though not be limited to—answers to the four questions that follow the excerpt.  Check back Friday afternoon for a second text on which to write, including as always your take on others’ thoughts from the first round.

“If when we learn new things we can see the world differently, then as we learn new things we react to it differently.  We are then living in a different world, a world with different possibilities, different impossibilities.  Which world is the right one, the real one?  Is it the new world or the old?  What do we mean by this question?  And, ultimately the question, if this is true, what new things should we try to learn so as to live in a different world?” (Lawrence LeShan, Alternate Realities: The Search for the Whole Human Being. New York: Ballantine Books, 1987, 8.)

1. What happens to us when we learn?

2. What happens to the world when we learn?

3. Do human beings, living in the same society, live in different worlds because of what they know?             

4. How does the following quote, from Emerson's Self-Reliance, affect your thinking on the previous question? “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius."

Friday Update:
Please continue your conversation in the context of the following ideas and questions.

"Fact and truth really don't have much to do with each other"
-William Faulkner


"Every knowledge system is shaped by the characteristics of the society that produced it.  We are accustomed to considering the flow in the opposite direction, seeing how scientific and technological advances have shaped modern society.  But it is of critical importance to recognize both flows.  We have the kind of society we have in part because of the fruits of science and technology.  But the converse is also true: we have the kind of science we have in part because of the particular nature of the society in which it was developed."  (Willis Harman, Global Mind Change: The Promise of the Last Years of the Twentieth Century.  Indianapolis: Knowledge Systems, Inc., 1988, 27.)


1.  How has your knowledge system been shaped by your society?  For example, how has science been shaped by your society?
2.  Can different societies have different sciences, histories, etc.?

And speaking of decoding, check this out.

What are you suggesting?

If we begin with a definition of connotations—found here or elsewhere—then the act of understanding them is one of decoding.  For Friday morning and your first round of comments, please identify and record here one act of decoding you commit (prosecuted or otherwise) in a class other than TOK.  Detail for us the explicit meaning of the text and all the implicit meanings you find, as well as how you use these meanings.  Then, in the context of what we’ve heard, read, and thought about free will (follow this for a new reading before your second posting) and how we choose, do some writing for Tuesday morning in which you reflect on the decisions you make in the process of decoding these implications.  To what extent are your understandings decisions that you control?  Remember, too, that these second rounds of comments should reflect your considerations of each other’s ideas.