A numbers expert declares he’ll sum up everything he knows about analyzing statistics on the back of a postcard. Could any TOK teacher NOT instantly spring to the alert? He’s inspired me to attempt my own lean summary: a single page mini-guide on (dis)trusting statistics, useful in our own educational context of Theory of Knowledge. […]
Read more “Civilians Attacked by Chemical Weapons!” Few headlines spark as much outrage. If a TOK class engages students in the questions of knowledge connected with this kind of horrendous event, it can help them feel the importance of the intellectual tools that the course provides for probing into – and reacting to – such events. A reflective piece in the current edition […]
Read more Well, we’ve done it at last. We’ve hit the Big Time. Suddenly the topics that we chat about every day in class – such as concepts of truth and reliability, the nature of “facts”, methods of validating or rejecting knowledge claims, and the dynamic and formative role of perspectives – have come into the glaring […]
Read more Word of the day: gullible. Definition: easily duped or cheated, quick to believe something that is not true. In this last of four posts on scams and the “confidence game”, I’d like to close with activities and discussion for students aimed at reducing their gullibility and augmenting (I hope) their skills of critical thinking. The […]
Read more Sharing – that’s what Theory of Knowledge teachers do. Long before the term “shared knowledge” took its central spot in our course, we teachers were passing around ideas and suggestions for lessons within our own IB community. Myself, I’ve been blogging on TOK for five years now, and you can see some of that history […]
Read more (Originally posted on Activating TOK) Is it obvious that medical conclusions ought to be based on evidence and science? What are the alternatives? For a smile along with the serious point, I recommend this satirical list by two doctors: “Seven alternatives to evidence based medicine” . Vehemence-based medicine? Eminence-based medicine? The list predates the recent book on celebrity-based medicine with the splendid title Is Gwyneth Paltrow […]
Read more (Originally posted on Activating TOK ) Who needs critical thinking when we have Google? A team of computer scientists working for Google has proposed an improvement on what comes up when we enter our terms in its search window. They suggest a method of calculating a “trustworthiness score” for webpages based on their factual content: “We call […]
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