Education for Tomorrow
One reads a lot about robots these days, and also about “21st century education“, “learning for tomorrow”, etc. (If you doubt me, do a search on these terms). But how far away is “tomorrow” – a “time...
View ArticleBusiness Management through the lens of TOK
The new Business Management guide makes the links between the subject and TOK far more explicit and increases the expectation that TOK should be incorporated into the Business curriculum, in addition...
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changes (1) – the new CAS guide for students graduating after 2017
Earlier this month the ‘new’ CAS Guide for students graduating in 2017 and later was released by the IBO. The publication of the new Guide is another chapter in the “evolution” of CAS and a deliberate...
View ArticleIs Believing Seeing?
We are used to coming across the phrase “seeing is believing” on a pretty regular basis. It is assumed to mean that the most important basis for taking anything to be true is to have a direct...
View ArticleBelieving and Learning
We are used to coming across the phrase “seeing is believing” on a pretty regular basis. It is assumed to mean that the most important basis for taking anything to be true is to have a direct...
View ArticleThinking in Black and White
The human brain seems to mostly operate using a default either/or operational system. Our experience of the world often seems to come to us in a way which requires choosing between two mutually...
View ArticleBinary Logic
The human brain seems to mostly operate using a default binary operational system. Our experience of the world often seems to come to us in the form of either/or choices between two mutually exclusive...
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Thinking: Fast or Slow?
For most of human history we have assumed our decisions to be the result of a conscious and rational process, and that we are in control of our most of our decisions and actions most of the time. Now a...
View ArticleTarkovsky’s Solaris and the Frailty of Perceptual Certainty
My interest in this was piqued while watching Adam Curtis’s excellent documentary Bitter lake (available to watch here or here). He used the main narrative motif of Tarkovski’s film as a metaphor to...
View ArticleTwo Cultures?
Image: Pinterest Do you think of yourself naturally as an artist or a scientist? Do you instinctively lean towards culture or technology? Are you predominantly left or right brained? Do you struggle...
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Was Plato Right?
Plato’s definition of what knowledge is, ‘justified true belief’, has been trotted out by countless IB students for generations, often without much thought as to its genuine value or validity as a...
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Art too bad to be ignored
In the Visual Arts Guide there is a series of questions related to TOK “that a visual arts student might consider” To what extent is artistic knowledge something which cannot be expressed in any other...
View ArticleKnowledge Questions
Knowledge Questions (KQs) are the heart of the Theory of Knowledge course in the DP, yet it is not unusual to find many students and (let’s say this quietly), even some teachers who do not seem to...
View ArticleBeing Human
This week I did something which I have rarely done in my many years of teaching; I asked students to spend a whole lesson watching a video. Each student was given a laptop and they were asked to put on...
View ArticleIs Economics a Science?
Robert J. Shiller is a Nobel Laureate in Economics and an Economics professor at Yale University, in an online article published in 2013 he addresses the vexed question as to whether Economics is a...
View ArticleThe Beauty in Maths
A few months ago the BBC conducted a survey to find the most beautiful mathematical equation in the world. There is of course a long history of the relationship between the idea of beauty and...
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How to Lie with Numbers
There is a common saying in English, “numbers never lie”, which presumably expresses the idea that any argument backed up by data, statistics or quantifiable information must therefore be trustworthy...
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So, What’s the News?
Every moment of every day, an avalanche of information is dispersed through countless media sources in a myriad of forms and this without respite, 24/7. This may be one of the most significant changes...
View ArticleThe Art of Knowing
There is no shortage of people who view Art or the arts as a largely redundant luxury which, other than as time filler, seem to add very little to the total sum of human knowledge. Art for them is an...
View ArticleIs Mathematics a Religion?
For many numerically illiterate people out there, the film The Man who Knew Infinity (released September 2015) was, if atheists will pardon the expression, a godsend. It describes the life and...
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