a resource for students and teachers

In TOK we began to investigate Reason as our Way of Knowing, and how statistics relates to this.  Two people came to mind:

Hans Rosling and his website Gapminder.org.  Here is an analysis of statistics by Rosling using his website that is similar to the TED Talk we watched in class:

Chris Jordan and his Running the Numbers (An American Self-Portrait) Project. On his website he describes the project:

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

Below is one example, but the experience is best navigated on this website, where you can zoom in on every picture for the full effect.

Continue Reading Article . . .

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As we begin our discussions on the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, I wanted to post some clarifications, and a location–this post–where we can add our reflections.  Please feel free to also add your discussion questions to this post ahead of time, if you would like your classmates to see them before your discussion time.

First, the clarifications as to what your discussion topics should include:

• Analysis of time and place in the story.
• What was easy to understand and what was difficult in relation to social and cultural context and issues.
• Connections between issues in the work and our own culture(s) and experiences.
• Aspects of style and technique
• Insights that you have researched / Supplemental discussion ideas (see handout)
• Ideas or visuals that will further our understanding and discussion of the short story.

In addition to leading one discussion over the course of our Borges unit, every student will write and post two reflections below. These reflections will each be between 300-400 words in length. One reflection needs to be posted immediately after the discussion of the short story your are responsible for, and one needs to be posted after our concluding discussion of the unit. Both should address the following question:

How was your understanding of cultural and contextual considerations of the work developed through the discussion?

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In order to avoid the dreaded curse of slideuments (presentations that are basically word documents pasted into a PowerPoint and helpful to no one), I wanted to point my students to some handy resources and ideas for creating presentations that are effective, memorable, and visually stimulating.

Two helpful websites that write about and compile presentation ideas are Garr Reynold’s Blog Presentation Zen, which expands on his book of the same name, and Note & Point, which is an online gallery of effective presentations. Presentations included on this site such as “7 Tips to Create Visual Presentations” (embedded below) and “How to Create Slides that Rock” practice what they preach.

Nancy Duarte’s company and her books, Slideology in particular, always provide helpful resources for communicating our ideas clearly to one another.  Just ask Al Gore, whose presentation An Inconvenient Truth was designed by Duarte’s crew.

We watched brief excerpts of two TED presentations, one on by Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity, and one by Wade Davis on worldwide web of belief and ritual. Both highlight different–yet highly effective–presentation styles.

Lastly, two related videos concerning the power of language as a tool for communication: Taylor Mali’s poem “Totally like Whatever, you Know” (It’s nice to see he gave up on the ponytail) and Stephen Fry’s “Language.”

Thanks to Mr. Nilsen for pointing me to some of these resources.

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