The SSIS TOK Blog Debut!

Cassie Armstrong | December 4, 2019 | AP/IB Info | No Comments

By Jeff Robidoux

Greetings Educators and Epistemologists!

After our last meeting when we shared a little ToK thinking together, I was thrilled to have a number of you offer your own ideas or ask to know a bit more about the mysterious enigma that is Theory of Knowledge. So I took that as encouragement!

The idea is to post a weekly blog about ToK and you. The principal threads will centre around a) how ToK helps us to make sense of our world, b) how ToK might fit into your classroom, and c) what our ToK students are doing.

Peek of the Week into ToK: World Go champion retires because he can’t beat the AI computers.

This seemed like a natural follow up to the AI/self-driving cars topic we looked at in the auditorium. (By the way, here is the link to the MIT site where you can analyse your own “ethical code”. Click “Start Judging” to judge and be judged!)

In this story, “The dominance of artificial intelligence in competitive strategy games has led one of South Korea’s top Go players to retire.” He claims that there would be no point being No. 1 in the world anymore if he would always be defeated by the machine. This raises a number of questions.

Is the machine’s dominance of a rules-governed strategy game a demonstration of “intelligence”?
What are we losing as humans if computers can do some things “better” than we can?
Are there any ethical concerns going forward as we continue to advance the “intelligent” capabilities of machines?
And finally, a classic ToK question, what does it mean to “know” something?

We’ll try an experiment and see how well it goes down: If you feel like chiming in on these questions, or adding some questions or comments of your own, click here to enter a discussion channel (aka Google doc!)

That is a good start for this week. Look for tips for the classroom in next week’s entry.

Regional IB Jobalikes

If you are interested in attending, email Cassie:
- Approaches to Teaching (ATT) – 7 February at EISHCMC
- EAL – 20 March at BIS Hanoi
- Incorporating TOK – 22 May at BIS Hanoi

Upcoming Due Dates:

7 January – First submission of Biology and Physics IA
10 January – First submission of TOK Essays
13 January – First submission of Chemistry IA

PingID for IBIS Access

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