do cinematographic representations of books tell the truth as well as the book does? - good TOK presentation title?

[adrie.boo]

Hi all,

I'm going to do my TOK presentation when i'm back in school after summer, but I wanted to get a start on it.

Do you think that this is a good title? and how could we possibly expand on the knowledge issue so it's more -TOK related?

my partner and i are really worried that this isn't a TOK-worthy title, in the sense that it doesn't address controversial issues such as abortion, or euthanasia, among others. also, that what we say isn't TOK related. we brainstormed a lot, but find it difficult to like it back to AOKs and WOKs.

any help will be appreciated!

Thanks a ton!!

[Sandwich]

Hi all,

I'm going to do my TOK presentation when i'm back in school after summer, but I wanted to get a start on it.

Do you think that this is a good title? and how could we possibly expand on the knowledge issue so it's more -TOK related?

my partner and i are really worried that this isn't a TOK-worthy title, in the sense that it doesn't address controversial issues such as abortion, or euthanasia, among others. also, that what we say isn't TOK related. we brainstormed a lot, but find it difficult to like it back to AOKs and WOKs.

any help will be appreciated!

Thanks a ton!!

Okay I suggest you change your perspective on how you're approaching this presentation or you will indeed find yourself not addressing any TOK -related material at all. You shouldn't be linking it back to AOKs and WOKs. For starters, forget AOKs, they are essentially things that exist in order to explore the interaction of WOKs and somehow make it so that TOK seems relevant to the academic environment all IB students are stuck in. You should be using an issue to FIND the underlying TOK stuff and then talk about THAT. So your presentation is not about your topic with the coincidental inclusion of whatever TOK stuff you can think of, your presentation is about the TOK stuff you have uncovered with small references to your topic an example of it happening in real life. I hope that makes sense. The whole point of a TOK presentation is to talk about TOK - which is a very specific subject that is NOT identical with interesting issues in the media. Believe it or not, doing a presentation on abortion and euthanasia is likely to result in a poor grade because only 1 in 100 (yes I made up this statistic but I wouldn't be hugely surprised if it were true...) would get completely the wrong end of the stick and start saying things like:

An ethicist would say...

According to Kant...

Using the AOK of ethics we can see...

= NIL point. No TOK points for you

"Using the AOK of ____" is 100% a nonsense statement, for instance. You can't use an AOK, an AOK is not even a thing! TOK is not about finding an issue and randomly naming AOKs vaguely related to it. TOK is about looking at the interactions of the ways of knowing and how they come together in a particular topic.

There IS a way I can see to get a TOK presentation out of your title by focussing (as really all TOK presentations should) on the ways of knowing and how they interact and are used by us to acquire knowledge in different situations - and their strengths and weaknesses. However you really must approach it properly down this route and be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that TOK is just an excuse to talk about a vaguely interesting topic, because it's actually a highly specific set of criteria you've got to hit if you want to get a good grade, and a limited subject to talk about.

I strongly recommend you read these two threads, as you'll find all I've done is repeated to you things which are made clear in many of the help threads stickied on the forum for this exact purpose:

Is this a good TOK Presentation title? / How do I pick my Presentation title?!

ToK Presentation Guide

I can tell you now that of all the people I give these links to, maybe 1 in 5 actually appears to have read them. The other 4 will post a reply to my response which clearly indicates to me that they can't possibly have given these threads a second glance, usually a rephrasing of their question which hasn't changed the approach one jot, presumably in the hope of being fed a title which will go down the right lines. I'm bored of doing other people's work and thinking for them, however. So I really do mean to read them before posting a reply to this because I honestly think that they'll make a big difference!

[adrie.boo]

thank you very much!!

hi sandwich, i hope you don't think badly of me, but i've read those links and rephrased my question - how do we know that books are always better than their cinematographic equivalents? i'm

the thing is most of the time, i'm in a blur during TOK and don't really know how the things we're talking about relates to TOK. we really tend to start leaning towards ethics and the issues relating from questionable practices... so i was still a bit bewildered reading through the links.

but from the link of the good TOK title, i've considered the ubiquitous TOK question - how do we know what we know? and I was thinking that the title could be approached by using the four WOKs, and arguing how some people are in support of books while others prefer movies. would that be better in the sense that a knowledge issue could be created?

1. Books are the original versions of stories.

2. Original versions have the most detail and uses a lot of words as opposed to images.

3. therefore books are better than movies

would this approach work? thank you so much for the explanation above! i didn't realize that the previous title didn't really address TOK.

[Guest Positron]

1. Books are the original versions of stories.

2. Original versions have the most detail and uses a lot of words as opposed to images.

3. therefore books are better than movies

1. Not always, there have also been cases where a book has been written based on a movie.

2. Again, you're assuming that books are always the original versions. And why would original equal better? And isn't a picture worth a thousand words? And why are words better in describing events, passing on emotions/thoughts to the reader when compared to cinematographic representations? Or are they? (I think that's actually the question you should focus on, how do textual and visual "methods" differ in passing on the story [knowledge])

And anyways often both of these are mixed in cinematographic representations, films are not always just dialogue, quite often you have a character just talking and telling about events. For example, the film Forrest Gump. The movie is quite largely just Forrest telling about his life. I might even say that in this case cinematographic representation was actually better than the original novel.

Just some thoughts. But please bear in mind these are coming from someone who has never had TOK and hasn't even started the IB yet, so I if was you I probably wouldn't listen to me

Edited June 27, 2012 by Positron

[adrie.boo]

positron, yep i was trying to bring out all those opinions!! because on a previous post (see sandwich's links), they had a title which was derived from three statements, similar to what i wrote. so i was wondering if it was actually alright to come up with a TOK title that can be argued both ways

and just so you know, even if you've had TOK (like me) you might still be pretty confused over the whole subject ahahah.

[Sandwich]

thank you very much!!

hi sandwich, i hope you don't think badly of me, but i've read those links and rephrased my question - how do we know that books are always better than their cinematographic equivalents? i'm

the thing is most of the time, i'm in a blur during TOK and don't really know how the things we're talking about relates to TOK. we really tend to start leaning towards ethics and the issues relating from questionable practices... so i was still a bit bewildered reading through the links.

but from the link of the good TOK title, i've considered the ubiquitous TOK question - how do we know what we know? and I was thinking that the title could be approached by using the four WOKs, and arguing how some people are in support of books while others prefer movies. would that be better in the sense that a knowledge issue could be created?

1. Books are the original versions of stories.

2. Original versions have the most detail and uses a lot of words as opposed to images.

3. therefore books are better than movies

would this approach work? thank you so much for the explanation above! i didn't realize that the previous title didn't really address TOK.

Not really, no. The big thing, as I said, is to discuss the ways of knowing and how we use those to get knowledge about X issue. I don't see any reference to the ways of knowing (and therefore TOK) in what you've written at all. Also your title contains a massive assumption (that books are best) and so isn't going to be well-received by default. Besides the fact that it's irrelevant, the argument you put also makes no sense - just read it back to yourself and think for a second and you should spot that pretty much every statement you've made is factually incorrect or making a massive assumption, and that none of them follow on from each other!!

The ways of knowing are reason, sense/perception, language and emotion. THOSE are what you need to talk about. Whether something is an original version or not clearly has nothing at all to do with any of the ways of knowing or the process of acquiring knowledge, it's just a random unrelated fact.