How to Post to the Class Blog

During your time in this course you will be required to develop an analytical approach to knowledge issues both in your essays and your oral presentations. To start familiarizing you with this analytical (TOK) approach, I figured we’d work backwards. These On The Media podcasts are rough examples of this type of analytical approach to a current issue/topic in the news and offer an opportunity to practice dissecting this type of thinking. The questions are simply meant as a guide for what you should include in your post, not, necessarily, a step-by-step recipe of how to unpack the issue.  

Ultimately, each of you will be responsible for seeking out an issue and do the type of analysis you are examining here. I have given you these topics and given you a discussion of them and am now simply having you unpack the key ingredients of them. I am giving you a proverbial fish and steps on how to gut, cook and serve it. The next fish you’ll need to catch, gut, cook and serve all on your own. Look at the examples I provide below to guide you in your posts to the blog.

STEP 1:  What is the current issue/event with a TOK orientation?

This is simply a quick summation of what the issue/event is. For those who didn’t listen to the podcast that you did, can you give them a brief overview of what it’s all about. What is the issue/event?

· EXAMPLE: Caster Semenya is a gold-medal winning South African sprinter whose gender has been called into question and is now under investigation by a special team of medical experts.

· EXAMPLE: The US Women’s Silver Medal 2008 Olympic Gymnastics team has officially lodged a complaint with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) questioning the legitimacy of several members of the Chinese Women’s Gold Medal Gymnastics Team to compete in the Olympic Games. The US team doubts that their Chinese counterparts meet the minimum age requirement of 16 demanded by the IOC.

STEP 2:  What Ways of Knowing (WoK) and/or Areas of Knowledge (AoK) are involved?

How are they involved in this issue/event?

As you examine this issue, what Ways of Knowing and Areas of Knowledge are relevant (not all need to be relevant).

Caster Semenya example

· Human Sciences – methodological questions about how one can accurately determine gender.

· Language – how do we best define “male” and “female”? Are they clear, binary categories or is it a gender continuum?

Chinese Gymnastics example

· Human Sciences – methodological questions about how one can accurately determine age.

· Sense Perception – is it sufficient to simply say that someone “doesn’t look 16”?

· Emotion – can the Chinese authorities be trusted when they present official paperwork certifying the gymnasts ages?

STEP 2 continued:  What is it that people are really arguing or debating in this issue?

If you distill this debate down to its most basic elements, what are they?

Caster Semenya example

· Are “male” and “female” clearly definable categories? Can words map territory?

· Can human beings be accurately and unambiguously grouped and categorized?

Chinese Gymnastics example

· Is human behavior (or physiology, in this case) measurable and predictable?

· Can we reduce human sciences to law-like regularities?

STEP 3: Why can’t they resolve or clarify the argument/debate? What keeps us from having a universally agreed upon answer to this issue?

Why hasn’t this gone away? Why are people still talking about this?

Caster Semenya example

· Definitions are not nearly as clear cut as people think. And when an outlier or unusual case takes us to the fuzzy borders of our conceptual categories (“male” and “female”), we fight about what methodologies (methods) should be used to provide “definitive” clarity.

Chinese Gymnastics example

· Generalizations can be made about human beings but for every “rule” you can always find exceptions. Human Sciences deal with complex phenomena that are not as easily reduced to governing laws. While we can use the methods we’ve developed (economic, psychological, anthropological, medical, etc) to aid us, we may never achieve absolute certainty about our object of study…namely, ourselves.

STEP 4: What other issues/topics/events share a similar problem?

Once you have hit the basic knowledge issue that lies beneath the original event/issue, can you show how this knowledge issue applies in other cases both within this area and others?

Caster Semenya example

· Definitional distinctions will always raise issues when the stakes are high. Is Caster Semenya male or female? Is bin Laden a “terrorist” or a “freedom fighter”? Is the CIA’s waterboarding policy “torture” or just “enhanced interrogation”? Is the earth experiencing “global warming” or simply “climate change”? The answers to these questions will tell us more about the people given the answer than it will solve the semantic (language) issue at hand.

Chinese Gymnastics example

• Can we ever achieve any accuracy in our generalizations and trends in human sciences? Can we predict how the stock market will behave in the future? Can we determine which students are “exceptional”? Can we measure intelligence?