Journal Entries
1-31-17
Today I learned quite a lot about sense perception. I feel like it was a really productive class period for me, and I was able to come up with a lot of tentative quiz questions regarding this chapter. I really had no idea that our five senses played such an important role as a source of knowledge for us. I also didn’t know that many people believe that there are some other senses that we may have as well. I think perception is super important, and our environment plays such a large role in the perceptions we make towards things around us in life. I also learned about what fallibility meant.
2-2-17
Today we took a quiz over sense perception and I scored an 8/10 on it. I was really quite surprised with how much I actually knew and had retained from just listening during class lectures. My group and I began to brainstorm and plan different ideas for our presentation to earn our badge. I came up with this idea where we do a hands on presentation regarding how much we rely on sight and smell the most to gain knowledge and experience new things. I thought, that we could have different items in a closed box and make each person in the class touch the items and try to guess what they are without actually getting to see them. They must only rely on their touch. Another idea I had, was each person gets blindfolded and must taste an apple or a potato with their nose and eyes closed, and see if they can detect a difference. I think this could be a really interesting and fun hands on activity that we would then relate back to sense perception and ways of knowing.
2-6-17
Today we will need to focus on how we are going to go about our presentation and activity. The gathering of the objects that we are going to use for our hands on activity will need to be done outside of class. We will bring them in on the presentation day. I think that today we need to focus on making our presentation and connecting our activity to what we are actually learning. Real world examples and possibly using TOK terms will help us with our presentation. The presentation we make will tie together our activity and how sight, touch, and taste all inn our opinion are the most valuable senses we can use to gather information.
Today I learned more about how to formulate a good smaller more concise question from a bigger more broad question. I accomplished quite a lot with my group today and really determined all the details necessary to complete this presentation. We stayed on task and figured out everything. We definitely are prepared for Wednesday. In order to finish we just need to make sure that everyone brings their assigned items and the other items like blindfolds and containers to put the items in.
Notes Taken/Things Learned
Sensation and Interpretation
* Sensation is what’s in the world around you.
* They make up the two parts of sense perception.
* Interpretation is how we see things.
* As humans, our favorite sense is sight.
* Our sense of reality is determined by our senses, but most specifically sight.
* Sensation would be the light when we see something.
* The interpretation of what we see could be something like “that’s a tree”
Sense Perception
* All knowledge begins with experience
* Empiricism is a school of thought which claims that all knowledge must ultimately be based on sense perception.
* Something we can sense with our senses
Reflective Journal Entry- Today we officially finished presenting our Sense Perception project/presentation. I think that overall we did quite a good job however, the guidelines and parameters required from us were a little hard to meet. I think that had our group rehearsed and planned more we would have been more prepared and would have not gone above the 5-7 minutes presentation guidelines. Overall though, I really feel like my group and I did a good job with the entire chapter and badge process. It's definitely a new system that will take some getting used to. I'd have to say though, sadly, I feel like this system is a bit ineffective and unnecessary. The workload that is expected from us is too much and takes in no consideration for most student's other IB classes. Yes, to a certain extent I did learn the information necessary in this chapter, however I learned it all by taking notes, listening, and taking quizzes. Not by making a presentation and reading and listening to elective resources. The concept is semi-successful however personally I feel like feedback from students needs to be taken, and then internalized and made alterations to.