Dear All,

Now that we have had some experience with preparing and delivering TOK presentations, it is time for us to turn our attention to essay work.

We are going to provide you with a procedure that we recommend for the essay writing process. In the mean time, here are the instructions and titles. Please think about how you could use your experiences with TOK and beyond in order to respond to each of these questions. Don't make a snap judgement about which one you think you would like to answer - in this task, often the snap judgements are the worst judgements.

Instructions
Your theory of knowledge essay for this semester must be written on one of the three titles (questions) provided below. You may choose any title, but are recommended to consult with your teacher. Your essay will be marked for proficiency in the four domains that are described in the assessment criteria published in the Theory of Knowledge guide. Remember to centre your essay on knowledge issues and, where appropriate, refer to other parts of your IB programme and to your experiences as a knower. Always justify your statements and provide relevant examples to illustrate your arguments. Pay attention to the implications of your arguments, and remember to consider what can be said against them. If you use external sources, cite them according to a recognized convention.

Note that statements in quotations in these titles are not necessarily authentic: they present a real point of view but may not have been spoken or written by an actual person. It is appropriate to analyze them but it is unnecessary, even unwise, to spend time on researching a context for them.

Respond to the title exactly as given; do not alter it in any way.

Your essay must be between 1200 and 1600 words in length.

Your essay must be submitted to your class teacher by TUESDAY 3rd MAY 2011.


TITLES

1. "For it is in the long run that, somehow, truth may survive - through the decay of untruth." (John Lukacs) To what extent is this the case in different areas of knowledge and in your own experience?

2. "We are more likely to be mistaken in our generalizations than in our particular observations." Do you agree?

3. “To know is to be able to predict.” How accurate is this claim in different areas of knowledge?

This is from a piece by Nicholas Carr who has written a book called "The Shallows", in which he outlines many effects that he thinks the online environment is causing:

There's a study called "The Laptop and the Lecture" that divided a class into two sets. One-half of the students could use their laptops in a classroom while listening to a lecture. They were free to surf the Web. And the other half had to keep their laptops closed. And then there was a test of comprehension. And the students who used their laptops scored significantly lower on the comprehension test for how well they could remember the content of the lecture. An interesting twist was that students who visited sites relevant to the content of the lecture actually did even worse on the test than students who browsed unrelated sites. It indicates that, even if you think that allowing students to look at other information relevant to what they're being taught might enhance their learning, it actually appears to have the opposite effect.

Source: http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Technology-Making-Your/66128/

Accompanying his book, Carr also wrote an article that has been widely discussed over the last year, called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" - read it here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/

What are your reactions?

Some people say that multiculturalism is a dead idea - they claim that it doesn't work. People with widely differing values, cultures, beliefs getting along together in the same society is not a reasonable expectation.

The roots of each country belong in one particular tradition that shapes its institutions and methods for making things happen effectively. As diversity increases, people experience an ever-widening gulf between the strong loyalty they feel to their own group and weaker ties to the society as a whole, and this leads to fragmentation and conflict.

Better solutions include encouraging people to stay where they "belong", or insisting that people adopt the core traditions of the country concerned whether or not they agree or conflict with their own values and beliefs.

What do you think?

Think about what the black box could represent in each of the areas of knowledge that we have discussed so far. What metaphorical "black boxes" exist in each of them? What approaches are taken by people working in each of these areas of knowledge in order to deal with their "black boxes"? Do any of these approaches correspond in any meaningful way to your approach to the real black box? Are "black boxes" sometimes deliberately created in some disciplines in order to help us in the creation of knowledge?

Here's a teaser:

History is littered with names for different ages - the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, etc.

In the future - maybe 100 years from now - what name will historians give to our age? Why?

What an eventful entry into March, the month of Ghana's independence!!!

So why would a class of 86 (I hope I'm right) people believe that "Ghaddafi" had decided to call on HGIC for a few hours?

What lessons relating to our study of TOK can we learn from the hoax pulled on the entire class and even to some extent the entire school?

Did people give the type of accounts they gave of the event due to their loyalties to certain people, or were certain reactions due to people's reluctance to give up positions they considered dear?

How does being in the know affect a person's reaction to an event?

More importantly, what are the truths that we learn from such a situation? How do such events bring underlying issues which society tries desperately to hide to the fore?

What kind of historian is the most reliable for obtaining knowledge?