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TOK Essentials

TOK Curriculum 

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

SCOPE—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
Holism vs. reductionism
Three intriguing links

Just a minute
Fun TOK class ritual

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!
Knowledge question challenge

Instantiation—where is knowledge?
Raw Data and Information
Knowledge—something true and useful?
The difference between a blink and a wink
Instantiation–unpacking knowledge scenarios

Immense, entropic universe becoming aware of itself

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—what’s happening?

What’s going on?
Identifying shapes and animals by touch alone
Discern the rules of invented games
Interpreting texts
Ways of putting a spell on you
Kukeri not Karaoke
Math and music
What’s happening, Banksy?
Oneself as a Learner
Shiny Brown Pupa
We do not play things as they are?

What do little kids know?
Conservation of quantity
Conservation of volume
An optical illusion
Ethical cartoons 
Generative questions

Octopus intelligence

Sentience continuum
Earthly intelligence
Alien Earthly intelligence
Artificial 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

Unreliability of eyewitness reporting
Memorize some flags
Stroop test
Count the passes
The fiction of memory–making it up as we go along!

Intuition
Estimate three minutes
Looming knowledge questions
Don’t think–act!

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?

Apprenticeship in ethics
Meta-thinking about ethics in TOK
Introducing ethical frames
Deontological
Golden Rule
Hippocratic Oath
Kant's Categorical Imperative
Consequential (Utilitarian)
IB Profile interlude
Intention
Virtue Ethics
What is the good life?
Human flourishing
IB Profile interlude
Intuition (and proximity)
Relativism
Veil of Ignorance
Personhood (Sentience)
Technomorality
What to do next?

Vera Drake: saint or serial killer?
Scaffolded written assignment

The Seven Deadly Sins

Deontological demystified

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 threat
Relevance to TOK
Connecting with Knowledge and politics
Prioritizing existential risk
Existential risk gallery

Promethean dreams
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

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

Zen TOK

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

Exorcizing 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

Asch and Milgram experiments
Perform Asch experiment
Propaganda interlude
Milgram experiment revisited

Physics envy
Five Knowledge Questions in rotation
Written assignment
Beguiling with statistics
In progress

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

Imagining geometry—a thought experiment!

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

Platonists and Formalists
Is math invented or discovered? 

Why is ethics like math and not like math?
A preposterous question! 
Breaking the 4th wall and brainstorming
Prove it!
Inventing math thought experiments
Attempting a calculus of felicity
The Golden mean is not the arithmetic mean
A self-evident, intuitive, axiomatic foundation for all of ethics?

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

Squidgy, pinkish buttery gloop
TEDx-style slideshow about the complexity of the embodied and embedded brain

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

Acknowledgements

Aún aprendo