Did you know that the Charlie Hebdou attack was not, as the media tell us, an attack by terrorists offended by the satiric magazines’ portrayal of Muhammed, the Prophet? Did you know, rather, that it was orchestrated by the U.S. in order to punish France for its foreign policy decisions? Did you know that pop star Kate Perry is, in fact, a member of the Illuminati , bent on world […]
Read more At first glance, this three-minute video ( 6 Photographers Capture Same Person But Results Vary Widely Because of a Twist ) provides a visually engaging, if rather obvious, illustration of differing perspectives at work as 6 photographers take distinctly unlike pictures of the same subject. Taken at face value, it’s an appealing resource for a TOK class on the effect of what we think (perspectives, WOK intuition/reason) on […]
Read more Does everyone really fall for con artists? Everyone, always? That’s the subtitle of Maria Konnikova’s book: The Confidence Game: Why We Fall For It…Every Time. No, I’m not going to fall for taking a catchy title literally! But if potential victims are so very vulnerable, is it utterly futile to try to develop skills of […]
Read more Stories have power. In the scams of con artists, they have the power to “get you emotionally transported enough that you stop asking questions, or at least the questions that matter.” So warns Maria Konnikova, whose recently published book The Confidence Game prompted my post last week, and this week. At the same time, however, […]
Read more In the Theory of Knowledge classroom, we can’t solve the problems of climate change, war, and terrorism. However, what we CAN do is much needed in this historical moment in the west: we can give our students a calm space to stand back from the high emotion and knee-jerk opinionating that surrounds many of them. […]
Read more Ice climbing to precipitous heights is not everyone’s idea of a good time. Certainly – most certainly – not mine! But while I find adventurer Will Gadd’s ascent of frozen Niagara Falls essentially horrifying, I’m intrigued at the potential for a stimulating TOK class that emerges from the videos of his climb in January and […]
Read more (Originally posted on Activating TOK) The statistics are horrifying. Every minute, a child dies from malaria. In 2013, 90% of the world’s malaria deaths occurred in Africa and over 430,000 African children died before their fifth birthdays. And there are plenty more statistics where these came from : In 2013, there were about 198 million malaria cases (with an uncertainty […]
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