Does Your Knowledge Measure Up?

Several parts of last night's class left me thinking about standards: those by which we judge ourselves and others; those by which we measure the world we inhabit.  One discussion touched on the potential objectivity of the measure "one foot."  My mind wandered to bureaus of weights and measures and the efforts they put forth to maintain constants.  For Sunday night, 9/28, at 9:30, please listen to this podcast, then write a post in which you share two knowledge questions directly related to the piece, one addressing History as an AoK, the other addressing Natural Sciences.  For each KQ, offer a related real world situation from your own experiences.  As you compose, keep in mind our discussion of hypothetical situations and their pitfalls.

What Hard Work Will Get You

As you toil away, crafting Extended Essays, holding down jobs, completing chores, caring for siblings, helping at home, and generally being responsible folks, take a few minutes to consider this article.  Read and write through the lens of what you know of colonialisms past and their accompanying oppressions.  Think, too, about the natures of education and culture and what moral compromises accompany them--are those concessions ever justified?  How does moral relativism play into this discussion?  Post a thoughtful response to the article, considering more than one perspective and including at least one knowledge question.  Your post is due, please, by your local noon on Wednesday 13 August.  This is your last post of the summer.  Thank you all for all of your hard work.

The Arc of the Summer

Recently, Franny shared a post with me that has stuck in my mind.  Check it out.  It's stuck with me, in part, because I'm unsure what to make of it, or rather I suspect it has more layers than I've yet been able to peel back.  It's about language, to be sure, and art and it's relationship with truth.  It's also about the nature of history as fact, faith as a way of knowing, and is painfully pertinent to the world right at this moment.  Humanitarian crises swirl in the Ukraine, Iraq, Gaza, Nigeria, along the U.S.-Mexico border, and beyond. This morning, listening to a news report of a fatwa issued by the members of ISIS, ordering all females in Mosul to undergo FGM (which, though it may be an erroneous report, is no less horrifying), I thought ruefully of some words of hope.  Some arcs, I thought, curve so gently as to appear linear.  I thought also, as we have before, together, of the intersection of truth and moral right with perspective.  These are the times, in the face of horror, that I struggle to understand the other side. We must not, surely, be asking one another to honor every perspective.  Isn't there, in some moments, an objective "right," and accompanying wrong?  Here, then, is your challenge: pluck a situation from this week's news, one where you see a clear moral distinction.  Defend it as such, then filter it through the origin of this post (the man on the bench). How do the two relate?  End with a knowledge question, please, and post by your local noon on Wednesday, 30 July.

Saving You From a Life of Crime

I told you this was the most importent course in the world.  Thirty-one years after he first proved that ice cream and accordions do mix, "Weird Al" Yankovic is back to insure that you're use of language is more than a way of knowing that you don't know what your talking about. Watch this video.  Twice. Does anything you c make you blush?  Is their a rule or a example there about which you're unsure? Considering you're in the middle of writing your extended essay isn't now a great time to make absolutely certain that you arent perpetrating a crime? Is the answer to all of these questions the same?  For your local noon on Wednesday 23 July, please post the following; one grammatically perfect paragraph identifying and explaining the most interesting discovery to date from your EE; a correction of 1 error from this paragraph. There are 15 errors: you must find one that nobody else has yet identified.

Don't Tell Me What To Draw

As the summer heats up, let's think about perspectives and the ways they're provided.  Consider three cartoons, the information they offer, and the ways that they deliver their messages.  First, examine this installment of xkcd, which allows you to draw your own conclusions (or does it?).  Likewise, this Doonesbury strip leaves the door open for readers to fall into the same trap as the patient--the first sign of effective satire.  Then again, it was pretty cold this winter...For local noon on Wednesday, please compose and share two knowledge questions about the ways of knowing employed in these three comics.

Space Lions

The 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously and opaquely said, "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him." What happens if we replace "lion" with "extra-terrestrial?"  No, not that one.  Read this post on Joshua Rothman's new blog.  For your local noon next Wednesday 2 July, please evaluate the claims made about language as a way of knowing.  Do you agree?  What are the implications? Is there another way of knowing via which we may better be able to communicate with such potentially disparate beings?

Viral Knowledge

As you gear up for the end of the year, be on the lookout for interesting ways of knowing.  For Saturday night, please describe an instance to which you then apply and answer the question "does knowledge, including culture, depend on language?"  For Monday night, build on the observation and analysis of a classmate; extract a knowledge question from another's Saturday post and connect it to a separate moment of knowledge of your own.  You may even wish to view the moment through an Andersonian lens.

Bigger Than a Quarter

It's time to look inward.  Let's read some neuroscience!  Please find an article on neuroscience, either from RadioLab or 3 Quarks Daily (on the Links list) or from Scientific American, Nature, or Science.  Once you've read (and likely reread) the article, extract one KQ that addresses Ways of Knowing and Areas of Knowledge, then answer the question from two perspectives (your own, explicitly defined in context, and another).  Include a brief introduction to the article in your post, along with a link to the article.  Please have this up by Sunday night.  Happy brain picking!

Mind Your Gap

Let's examine the What and the How.  Choose a graph on Gapminder (from the links list at right). Extract two Knowledge Questions from the graph: one derived from its information; one examining how the information is presented.  Be sure to include a link to the graph you select.  Please complete your post by the end of Sunday.

Billions and Billions of Knowledge Questions

As you ponder your role as animated star stuff, take a break and watch the last 15 minutes of the first episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Remember to both enjoy the loving science and to examine how knowledge is shaped and presented.  When you're ready, please post the following:

• 3 Knowledge Questions raised by the episode
• 2 additional situations to which each KQ could be applied
• Answers to each KQ in each of the three situations (Cosmos and the other two, for each), from your perspective and an additional perspective.  This will yield six answers for each KQ for a total of 18.

Please complete this thinking and writing by Wednesday at 9:30 pm.  We will use this work to scaffold your essays.

Fun fact: in his house in Ithaca, Carl Sagan had a giant Mobil gas station Pegasus sign on the wall.