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350 LINKED CLASS ACTIVITIES ON ONE ENORMOUS PAGE
AI generated selfie images of Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Theresa by Midjourney.
TOK Essentials
Knowledge Questions
Knowledge Question exemplars–“going meta”
Worthy, open-ended questions about real-life situations or Areas of Knowledge
The critical importance of using real life examples to explore Knowledge Questions
TOK is not philosophy
Some enormous philosophical questions
TOK Framework
Scope
Perspectives
Methods and tools
Ethics
Core Theme–Knowledge and the Knower
What counts as Knowledge?
Starting TOK
First TOK class
Explore mystery objects by touch alone
Whatever next?
Common agreements
TOK essentials—not yet
What are your students actually going to do?
Reflections on the TOK mindset
Student Knowledge claims
Iconic class activity
Typical crop of student knowledge claims
The Map is not the Territory
Raucous ice-breaker
London underground
Extension material
Signifiers
Map of a cat
Scientific models
Zooming in
Zooming out again
Quotations for reflection
The Allegory of the Cave
Encounter with Plato's original text
Extract and interim guiding questions
Truman show—on the air, unaware
Parable of the blind men and the elephant
Ready… fire, aim! — revisited
The poem
Pachydermal caricature
Warm-up questions
Three intriguing links
Knowing that and knowing how
First TOK writing assignment
Justified true belief
Three legged stool metaphor
Gettier case
Theories of Truth
Correspondence, coherence and pragmatic theories of truth
Thinking about certainty
Art and truth
Two non-western perspectives
God’s eye view thought experiment
This statement is false
Good and bad explanations
Explanation as problem solving
Reach and variability
The gods did it!
It’s all about the Earth’s tilt
Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself?
Coincidence? I think not!
Do good explanations have to be true?
Portfolio knowledge questions
Sentience continuum
Earthly intelligence
Alien intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Instantiation—where is knowledge?
Raw Data and Information
Knowledge—something true and useful?
The difference between a blink and a wink
Instantiation–unpacking assigned knowledge scenarios
Popper’s “three worlds” of knowledge
Knowledge evolves
Meme”—a new kind of replicator!
Harari’s useful fictions
Play the peppered moth game
Preconditions for natural selection
Artificial selection
Encounter with Neural Darwinism
Entropic Universe becoming self aware
Squidgy, pinkish buttery gloop
TEDx-style slideshow about the complexity of the embodied and embedded brain
Perspectives
Figs from multiple viewpoints
Direct sense perception
Scientific perspective: pollination of the fig
Poetic voice: fig symbolism
Introducing the Harkness Table
Selected lines from “Fig” by D.H Lawrence [1923]
Art historian and theologian
Economist
Archeobotanist
Linguist
A personal memory
Relevance to the TOK exhibition
Relevance to the TOK essay
Interpretation
Whole page in progress
What do little kids know?
Conservation of quantity
Conservation of volume
An optical illusion
Ethical cartoons
Generative questions
Octopus intelligence
Feral children and forbidden experiments
Victor and Genie: cautionary tales
Forbidden experiments
Cultural relativism
Active sense perception
Blindspot
Eye tracking
It's all about the fovea
Encounter with Yarbus
What is it like to be a bat?
Tick Umwelt algorithm
Animal senses gallery
If a lion could talk
Tools
41 orders of magnitude!
Powers of 10
Extended phenotype
Electromagnetic spectrum
Hubble interlude
The special case of brain imaging
Glass brain project interlude
The unreliability of eyewitness reporting
Memorize some flags
Stroop test
Count the passes
The fiction of memory–making it up as we go along!
Emotion and intuition
Estimate three minutes
Looming knowledge questions
Trusting your gut
Don’t think–act!
Cognitive bias—heuristics
Thinking fast and slow
Belief without evidence
Wittgenstein's beetle in a box
Role of faith and trust in Areas of Knowledge
Pascal's wager
From seat belts use to existential threats
Ethics
Ethics vs. morality
What's good?
Is there a difference between ethics and morality?
Duty, utility and intention
Introducing ethical frames
The Seven Deadly Sins
Why is ethics like math and not like math?
Page in progress
Vera Drake: saint or serial killer?
Scaffolded written assignment
Asch and Milgram experiments
Perform Asch experiment
Propaganda interlude
Milgram experiment revisited
Optional Themes
Knowledge and Technology
You are the product
Digital technology and you
Seven provocative internet quotes
Do you own your name?
Television delivered people
1909 literary anticipation of the internet
Infantilized humans in WALLᐧE (2008)
In praise of Wikipedia
Spontaneous trivia search online
What do we already know about Wikipedia?
A free encyclopedia that anyone can edit
Jaron Lanier’s dystopian question
Faking it
Try not to think at all
Knowing and thinking
Deep fakery
Knowledge and technology intersecting with knowledge and politics
Video gaming: distraction or medicine?
Epistemic hunger—we are information seeking creatures
An encounter with Endeavor.Rx
Esports
Chess algorithm—AlphaZero
Checkmate in four moves
Tic-tac-toe algorithm
From Deep Blue to AlphaZero
Coda: Black box bots
Artificial Intelligence
The Turing Test and the Chinese Room
Can a machine know?
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
Autonomous swarming slaughterbots—be very afraid!
Trolley problems and self driving cars
Classic Trolley problems
Beyond theoretical—self driving cars
Gorillas, robots and personhood
Koko the gorilla
The Clever Hans effect
Sentient robots and individual rights?
Existential threats
Relevance to TOK
Connecting with Knowledge and politics
Prioritizing existential risk
Existential risk gallery
Forbidden knowledge archetypes
Ancient myth in modern dress
A thought provoking transition
Prometheus myth
Icarus and Daedalus
This is the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed
Pandora’s box
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Eating the forbidden fruit
Destroyer of worlds
Knowledge and Language
Problem of definition: beef and cows
Try not to think of an elephant
Cow or beef?
Chairs continuum
Vagueness and fuzzy logic—in progress
Lumpers and splitters—in progress
Thinking about induction
Orwellian encounter
Language games
Games and sports
Invent your own game
Wittgenstein and family resemblances
Wittgenstein and the polysemy of language
Opinion and belief
Induction and deduction
Looking at syllogisms
Induction and continuity
Applying deductive and inductive reasoning to some real data
Falsification as the demarcation of science
Induction and deduction diagnostic quiz
A learned Soviet psychologist converses with a stubborn Uzbek peasant
Informal logical fallacy
Recognizing the flawed logic
Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies
Monty Python witch scene
In praise of the poetic voice
Getting the hang of it entirely
Shakespeare’s Cleopatra beggaring description
Knowledge and Politics
Ten most pressing world problems
Ready, fire… Aim!
World Democracy Index
Democracy and informed citizenship
Worst form of government?
From state of nature to social contract
Informed citizenship
Orwellian Newspeak
Narrowing the range of thought
Power and Truth
Snyder on Tyranny
Scientific fundamentalism Harkness discussion
Jonestown soundbite
Post-truth?
Are we living in a post-truth world?
Propaganda then and now exhibition
A really good conversation
Endnote: worth the fight
Politics divides
Analytical Surveys
Where do your political ideas come from?
The narcissism of small differences
Polarization and media bias
Fourth and fifth estates
News personalization
Epistemic justice
Thinking about equity and identity
Rawls rules: Veil of Ignorance
Burkini: competing freedoms
Forced to be free
Going deeper: Laïcité
Pluralism
Knowledge and Religion
Introduction to the Variety of Religious Experience
World Faiths Slideshow
Global Religious Landscape
A Trick Question About Religion
Languages Of Papua New Guinea Origin Story
A very persistent meme
Sixty second adventures in religion
The God meme--Going Viral
On the limits of evolutionary psychology
Differentiating religion/religiosity from personal faith
Refining our definition of religion
Religion/religiosity vs. personal faith
Encounter with radical atheism
The four horsemen
Bertrand Russell
Knowledge and Indigenous Societies
Defining “indigenous”
The meaning of indigenous
Going deeper
Nacirema
Canonical 1956 case study
What can we learn from traditional societies?
Revisiting and further refining our original definition of indigenous societies
Embodied and embedded
Exorcising cultural relativism
What is moral relativism?
Taking a stand
Indigenous Questions
Indigenous themed written assignment
Areas of Knowledge
History
Draw history (including cubist history)
Evoke history without words
Cubist history
History is not what happened
What historians do
Comparing history to science
Trotsky air-brushed
The map that made a nation cry
Napoleon rendered in oil paint
The Retreat from Moscow
Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture
History vs. historical fiction
Hilary Mantel perspective
The Human Sciences
Consilience of Knowledge
A hierarchy of knowledge?
Remembrance of things past
Proust’s Madeleine cake
Memento (2001)
Time machine in the brain
Consequences of total recall
Imagining and remembering
Physics envy
Five Knowledge Questions in rotation
Written assignment
THE NATURAL SCIENCES
Is there a scientific method?
Are you doing any real science?
Hypothetico-deductive model
Why trust science?
Nature: an encounter with a real science journal
Getting published in nature
Arcane sentences hastily chosen from nature
Biological languge delights
Masters and apprentices
Navigating biological vernacular
Etymological
Esoteric plural forms
Celebrated namesakes
Eccentricities
Thinking critically about biological classification
Superior bipeds
Theory of Ignorance
The pursuit of ignorance
Boundaries of knowledge model
Negative capability
Mathematics
Proof
Solve a quadratic
Sum of the angles in a triangle
The Monty Hall problem
Thinking about proof and intuition
Ideal gas law compared to Euler’s relation
Pure and applied mathematics
The path from metaphor to algorithm
Mathematical induction
Revisit Pascal's triangle
Build a house of cards
The special case of proof by mathematical induction
House of cards resolved
This Statement is False
The liar's paradox
The barber's paradox
Non-Euclidean geometry
Infinities
Beguiling with statistics
In progress
Platonists and Formalists
Written assignment
The Arts
Shostakovich 8th string quartet
Experiencing the music
Evoked emotions in the visual arts
Gallery of powerful emotions and appetites
Picasso’s lie and Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief
Picasso's Tête de taureau
Willing suspension of disbelief
Imagination (with constraints) and living in the subjunctive
Artistic imagination
Imagination in a tight straitjacket
Are imagining and remembering almost the same?
Do we live in the subjunctive?
Rembrandt self portraits
A recognized central case of greatness in traditional art
Duchamp's Fountain and Cage's 4'33''
Provocative artworks stack
The value of art
Artworks key and auction value
Astonishing high art brain imaging
Glass Brain and Self Reflected
12 TOK Concepts
Evidence
Certainty
Truth
Interpretation
Power
Justification
Explanation
Objectivity
Perspective
Culture
Values
Responsibility
TOK Assessment
Exhibition
Foreshadowing the exhibition–revisiting the first TOK class
Figs also revisited
Exhibition essentials
Online or public event?
Choice of objects and using a theme
Teacher intervention
Grading IB exemplars with the rubric
Spoilers aloud—exhibition trailers
Ready, fire… aim!
Essay essentials
Getting started
Rite of passage
Essay essentials
Three teacher interventions
Grading IB exemplars with the rubric
Prescribed titles brainstorm encounter
Next…
TOK Essay strategy
Getting Started
Overview
Unpack your prompt
Reconnect with the 5 Areas of Knowledge
Focus on your TOK essay format
Approximate word count allocations
Using the TOK framework to refine your essay planning
Tweaking worked through examples
Returning to the rubric
Finessing the quality of your analysis
Hidden in plain sight —TOK Aims are the secret key to essay success
To and fro – revisiting what makes a good conversation
Final quick rubric-based checklist
TOK Essay virtuosity
Reflections on the very best TOK essays
Clarity
TOK Essay blunders to avoid
Own goal
TOK Essay satirical poem
Plagiarizing TOK essay command terms
To what extent?
Who wants to know?
TOK and metacognitive possibilities
Reflections on deep learning
Communities of knowledge
Smart apes
Mind on the hoof
Astonishing predicament
Capable and fallible
Positive Knowledge
Counterclaims and alternative perspectives
Constant questioning
Who do you think you are?
The Ship of Theseus
Endgame
Last TOK class
Me as a Knower and a thinker
Post-truth questions
Final thoughts…
This is where the story stops this ti…
Student feedback
Feedback survey
Free response questions
Andrew Brown (2023) Gestural figure drawing. Ink, acrylic and charcoal on paper.