Alexandre Ait-Ettajer

Marwan Al-Edrus, Zoe Grout

AOK Badge: History

Risks of First Hand Knowledge: The Fallibility of History

Documentation

Journal

Journal 1

Though having missed one class was a major drawback in learning about History, I believe I can bounce back with my group. I have a group of people that are all smart and dedicated and believe in what we will be doing. The only thing that I am scared about is that all of us may be smart, but we all procrastinate a lot so hopefully we can get things done beforehand.

We started the day off by getting into our groups, Marwan and Zoe. We took the quiz, which I passed with a 90%, I missed one of the questions that had two answers and only put one. Other than that the quiz was quite easy. While waiting for the rest of my group to pass the retake, Marwan and I tried to formulate our question based on the Textbook and TOK Badges Documents. We haven't gotten anywhere but we definitely want to talk about the flaws in sight and how this affects our world.

Journal 2

Our group has not made any progress in our project and this is our last day to complete it. I have not lost faith in my group members, I feel that they are all capable of doing good work. The problem is that we can not agree on what we all want to do. We're all proud about our ideas and believe that our ideas are the most important. Though this back and forth is good for planning, we're not actually progressing and making anything.

What do we have to do?

So what we have to do is finalize the project question that we want to answer and come up with how to do it. Though I don’t know what we are going to do I believe that this can all be accomplished if we work through the whole of the class period. We must not get off task and there must be a system for keeping everyone on track keeping them focused.

What did you learn?

I learned that though we may trust our history that we have been taught. We must make sure that whatever we learn is taken with a grain of salt, because we have to understand that sources of knowledge had biases of their own and perceived very differently. I also learned that the AOK History is closely tied to that of the WOK Sense Perception.

Essential Terms:

Empiricism: the philosophical view that the source of all knowledge is sense perception and the experiences derived from it

Rationalism: the philosophical view that knowledge can be inherent; as in it does not require a source, but rather is present from the moment the knower becomes a conscious entity

Yesterday I finished my second elective reading, "How can going Blind give you Sight?," by Isaac Lidsky. Mr. Lidsky was very inspirational and described his struggles of being blind and how sight can be hinderance in what we do in life. He talked about how he didn't let being blind hinder his life and to still doing everything he wanted to do. He had a very inspirational metaphor about how fish swim backward by wagging their head. I have learned to be able to comprehend that even though there may be things that I hate about myself I can still find ways to become better. Senses such as vision allow us to comprehend the world, but we shouldn't cave into them and only rely on them.

Journal 3

I have found out that we are in a lot of trouble since we do not have anything concrete to create our presentation. We have to make our whole presentation over the weekend and make the knowledge question that we'll present. There is no other thing that I can say in this journal. All I can say is that we need to finish soon. We'll have to plan to Skype over the weekend and create the slides we'll present.

Knowledge Questions: Through the day, we have formulated a couple of Knowledge questions. Hopefully we can choose from one of them.

1. Is first hand knowledge reliable as a source?
2. What is the inherent meaning of History
3. How do Illusions affect our comprehension of the world and the history we attain?

Journal 4

Today I think we are ready to present but we are all stressed about presenting and are trying to find solace in what we are trying to complete. All we have to do is go through a quick run through of the presentation. After that we will be fine and the presentation will go “okay”. Once we are done with this presentation I’m going to try and find a more productive group that I can. I think that as a group we need to work on collaboration issues and make sure that we coordinate better.

As a personal goal I believe that I need to stop procrastinating and relying on people to do work for me. This has led me to a failed presentation and maybe another today. Hopefully not. Also as a personal goal I want to be able to learn and comprehend how the world works and be able to comprehend how to react in social situations.

I think that I was fumbling and stumbling around in our presentation and this was really bad for me and my group. If I weren’t to have been so incompetent then I think I could have become a real asset to this group. Otherwise I think that we did all right and that there were many other ways that this presentation could have gone awry. If anything I believe that we didn’t do that bad.

If I were to do this again, I would try to make sure I was more prepared and that everything could have been more cohesive and better entangled! Also I also hope to be able to make a good presentation next time.

Extension Proposal

Does the way we see the world confine us to certain truths?

This presentation should be added as a resource because it explains very well the specificities of how our lives are limited in many aspects. It is related to the TED talk that I listened to. It taught me that my knowledge of the world is not the truth and I need to spend as much time as I can to open my horizons.

Personally I have been struggling with accepting life around me. So to hear from people that understand me in the smallest way was very moving for me. I really enjoyed this experience. I hope to be able to enjoy life more from now on.