TOK Presentations: What is your Real Life Situation & your Knowledge Question?

The fundamental question of the IB Theory of Knowledge class is How do we know?  We explore different methods and purposes of creating knowledge, weighing their advantages and disadvantages, their limitations and possibilities.  How knowledge is created in a biology class is different from creating knowledge in a literature class.  How knowledge is created in economics is different from how a tribal member knows which medicinal plant to use in a given situation.

Some general questions regarding the construction of knowledge are:

How do we justify our knowledge?  

What is allowed as good evidence?

What constitutes an acceptable explanation?

How do we know which model is the most accurate?

Knowledge questions are at the very center of the class.  An explicit aim of TOK is that the student learn to "formulate, evaluate, and attempt to answer knowledge questions."  At first many students find all this extraordinarily difficult.  Let's take a look at the criteria for Knowledge Questions.

The IB Course Guide gives clear criteria for Knowledge Questions.  They are:

1. Open-ended questions.  These are questions that have more than one plausible answer.  You must explain and justify your answer.  It does not inevitably mean that a question is irresolvable.  One answer may be more correct than another.
2. Explicitly about knowledge. 
3. Expressed in TOK terms.  These are a selection of terms:  Belief, Certainty, Evidence, Explanation, Fact, Hypothesis, Ideology, Interpretation, Judgement, Knowledge, Law, Paradigm, Theory.
4. Clear in the relationships between these terms

As we begin the first round of TOK Presentations, can we place our Real Life Situations and Knowledge Questions online below?  Please record these by 27 March.