ToK Blog Homework 8/10/09

In class today, I hope you came to some conclusion about our knowledge communities and their inherent limitations.  I think its important that we finished with Sir Ken's words, as his idea of what education needs to be - I write needs instead of ought because there is an urgency to his TED speech that I hope was not lost on any of us this morning -  is exactly what I think we're trying to do in ToK.  I am, in a way, a victim of the very education inflation that Sir Ken referred to and I'd hate to see any of you in the room go down that same road of disappointment and resentment that further education will inevitably lead to if we don't start to think differently. 

In my freshman year at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, I had the real pleasure of going to an evening lecture with James Burke, science historian and tv presenter, in which he warned against a tendency towards specialisms, in which every student becomes more pigeon-holed into a specific category of study - never seeing the forest, for the trees.  He saw this as dangerous and I tend to agree - no doubt because I watched his Connections series as a child and was influenced by his thesis that everything, all knowledge, is interlinked and that true innovation and creativity is come to by those who are aware of these links and take advantage of them.

And so that brings me back to the idea of education from your blogs last week and its institutions that we consider to be perhaps the most influential when it comes to where we get our knowledge.  Your new Blog task is to read over the following questions about knowledge communities and reflect on them in your blogs.  Remember, next week is the 2nd marking of your Blog entries, so let's keep up with them. 

• Do knowledge claims transcend different communities or cultures?
• What differences exist between public and private justifications?
• To what extent might this distinction between private knowledge and public knowledge be culturally dependent?
• Does making a knowledge claim carry any particular obligation or responsibility for the knower?

 PS - some of us haven't linked our blogs to this site - so some of us do not have a mark yet for the last blog mark up.  Get linking guys!!!