IB TOK Exhibition Example #3

hi this is the third tlk exhibition sample from semantic education and as usual i'm going to walk you through the selection of the three objects and the thinking process behind it and in this third video i'm going to try a new approach to creating the exhibition just a reminder about the requirements of the tok uh exhibition for the exhibition students must do the following they must select three real world objects they must link them to one of the 35 knowledge questions that are given in the guide also called the ia prompts and they must write

a commentary of up to 950 words on all these objects combined the commentary for each object must include an identification of the object in its specific real-world context an explanation the link between the object and the ia prompt and the justification of the inclusion of the object in the exhibition these requirements are briefly summarized in our video called what is the tok exhibition it's on our youtube channel if you haven't watched it yet do check it out uh so as i said this is the 30 okay exhibition sample in our c in our series and

in these videos my purpose is to try and demonstrate not just the final product a sample tok exhibition but the whole process that goes into the creation of this product so that students can follow and reproduce this thinking process if they want in the first video i started with a prompt and i worked my way down to the specific objects i called this the top down process in my second video i tried the opposite approach a bottom-up approach i started with an object and then i tried finding a prompt that best fits into the object

in this third video i was thinking about what other approach i can take and i will start with a theme this time and even uh more specific than that i will start with a particular topic particular lesson topic within a theme then i will try to find an interesting object and then i will try to look for a prompt that is suitable for it so the an overview of the first two exhibitions given here if you haven't watched the first two please do check them out some starting points um i want to narrow down my

search by starting with a particular lesson topic that i found interesting from there i will use the bottom-up approach to kind of select an object first without thinking about which ia prompt it's most suitable for once an interesting object is selected i'm going to try and find the knowledge question that can be used for it after that i will just see how it goes i will select the first object i will link it to the knowledge question and then i will see how it works out where my reasoning takes me remember that whatever objects you

select i the ib is really adamant about objects being something specific embedded in a specific real-life context rather than a generic object as they write in the guide a generic teddy bear is not okay but a teddy a specific teddy bear that you had as a toy in your childhood and that you grew emotionally attached to is better because it has a personal context around it so let's go go over to the key task selecting the first object which seems to be the most difficult step in this whole process um and thinking back about what

we did in class imagining a student um suppose i find it extremely difficult to choose from an unrestricted array of objects the world is just too big for me to choose from and i feel overwhelmed so to narrow down my choice i'm thinking why don't i start with something that we discussed in class and i found pretty interesting so i could just use that as my starting point um thankfully my lessons were full of interesting examples and of course i'm not going to just simply take one of these examples and use i'm not going to

use a textbook example but i'm going to use that example as an inspiration for me to find something similar or as an inspiration for me to enhance my thinking process so what did we do in class i randomly remember one of our lessons i leave through the textbook and select a lesson entitled redefinition of art that's lesson 14 in unit 2 in our textbook the unit itself is a knowledge and technology but if you know our textbook it's built thematically which means that our areas of knowledge are taught through themes rather than separately from them

so we apply knowledge and technology to natural sciences knowledge and technology in human sciences knowledge and technology in history and so on and so forth so this particular lesson is one of the lessons exploring knowledge and technology in the arts and in particular the focus is on digital art um in that lesson uh an example that was brought up is harry potter and the portrait of what looked like a large pile of ash if you haven't read this wonderful chapter yet it's uh it's highly recommended that you go ahead and read it it is an

ai generated chapter of harry potter produced by the tech company botnick studios i will put a link to the company into the chapter itself in the description under this video uh essentially they had an algorithm that was trained on all seven of rowling's harry potter books and it imitated her style of writing her style of constructing sentences a choice of words and when the algorithm learned from her selling books it produced a text of its own which is which took the form of this additional chapter i read it and it's quite hilarious sometimes it's very

thoughtful sometimes it's very insightful sometimes it's borderline ridiculous but it's definitely worth a read so i like this example very well very much and i'm thinking it's just interesting it could it could make a good object for one of my objects in the exhibition but obviously i can't just take the textbook example as it is and just go with it um i need to use that as an inspiration and find something else but i know that i was so impressed by this ai produced chapter that he started looking for more examples of literature produced by

artificial intelligence and i found many other things online among these things they stumbled upon the website called poets.com um again a highly recommended destination essentially the website is a competition between humans and machines in writing poetry in other words a turing test from poetry uh you need to read a bunch of poems and for each one find what or not in other words you need to decide if the poem was written by a human or by a machine and the idea is that if you can't do it successfully then you lost and the machines have

passed the turing test so they give you ten poems and if you um if you fail to uh correctly identify uh at least half of them as written by a human being then the conclusion is that you can't tell the difference between a human generated poem and a machine generated poem which means that poetry that machines generate is indistinguishable from whatever poetry we humans generate which is a big deal one of the poems that they found there number six of ten it's really not important which one to take but this particular one i found quite

tricky i thought it was written by a human but it turns out it is written by a machine so this particular poem was one of the poems that that managed to fool me it's a screenshot from website.com and i do invite you to go to the website and take the whole test and see for yourself if you can if you can pass it or not or rather if the machines can pass it so uh the object seems interesting i can use that as the first object in my exhibition but i still don't have a prompt

so i need to scan the list of 35 ia prompts and see if there's anything that's suitable and that will fit my object nicely i start looking at the list and it feels like the best candidate is this one how important are material tools in the production or acquisition of knowledge i can argue using this particular example that poetry is one form of knowledge and well according to one of the viewpoints so a work of art in itself contains some form of knowledge so the poem in itself bears some sort of knowledge we can claim

and if poetry is a form of knowledge indeed then this form of knowledge is often argued to be inherently human only we humans can produce that kind of knowledge so indeed if poetry is a form of knowledge and if computers can produce poetry that is indistinguishable from that of humans then we can argue that computers have become very important in producing knowledge so it does link to the prompt in this way how important are material tools in the production of knowledge if if a poem is a form of knowledge and writing a poem counts as

production of knowledge the poem was written by a computer algorithm which is a material tool and it shows how important they are because at this point they're so good that we can't even tell computer generated poetry from human generated poetry at all times so important that computers are taking over the human territory it seems if you're taking over something that has been considered to be inherently human for a long time so there we go it will become my first object uh it's an ia generated poem called a sound one of the ten poems participating in

the bot or not competition on poet.com and the real world context is that this website is a curing test for poetry and that i have failed this test and to my surprise i i have taken this test and from to my surprise i have failed it how does my object link to the prompt well i can say that poetry is traditionally thought of as human territory and the only tool involved in its creation traditionally was supposed to be the human soul but this particular poem looks very much like human creation which shows that material tools

such as computer algorithms and ai are becoming so important that they're starting to take over human territory and knowledge and finally how do i justify the inclusion of the object in my exhibition well i included this because it makes a very strong claim it makes the claim that material tools are very important because they can replace humans even in such form of forms of knowledge as poetry done let's go over to the second object um i'm looking at this uh excerpt from the uh jok exhibition assessment instrument and i'm looking at these highlighted words in

particular there's a strong justification of the particular contribution that each individual object makes to the exhibition for the highest markland it suggests to me that um each individual object makes a particular contribution to the exhibition i can't really select the second object in a way that will repeat the same kind of idea that has already been conveyed by my first object i should probably be selecting the second object would be aim to develop the message not just to find another example similar to my first example to illustrate the same kind of point although that would

be the easy way out uh i don't want to go along that truth i want to take an object from some other walk of life so i'm thinking what have i talked about so far it talks about poetry as a form of knowledge and i don't know what terms are attached to it yet but so to speak poetry is a special form of knowledge it's knowledge of our internal world knowledge of the human soul or whatever subjective experiences we are sharing through poetry how about i look at some other forms of knowledge such as the

knowledge of the world around us the external world so to say so with that in mind i ask myself what material tools help us acquire knowledge about the world around us and they start thinking and obviously the first things that come to my mind are things like calculators or microscopes or telescopes i can argue that we we see more distant objects when we use a telescope and in this sense a telescope is really important because it enhances our biological uh senses but it seems like a trivial point quite an obvious thing so i don't really

want to make this point i try to go further than that and they start thinking about the biggest telescopes or the most complicated tools of knowledge production ever made that's just where my thinking takes me what comes to mind when i think about big and complicated tools of knowledge production is the large hadron collider but because that's something i i know from the past it's something passively residing in my background knowledge i know a little bit about the large hadron collider but i decided to read a bit more so go online and do my research

i learned or relearned that the large hadron collider is the largest particle accelerator in the world it is uh also the largest machine in the world the natural fact which makes it a good selection of the second object because being the largest machine in the world seems like a nice background context to it the large hadron collider was built by the european organization for nuclear research cern uh it took 10 years to build the thing and more than a hundred countries collaborated in the project it's a massive uh impressive project it lies in a tunnel

underground the tunnel is 27 kilometers in circumference and it lies 175 meters beneath the surface of the earth near geneva near geneva beneath the france switzerland border the purpose of the large hadron collider is to accelerate particles and make them collide so the idea is that you accelerate particles you make them collide at a very high speed and due to the impulse of the collision they can break if they consist of smaller stuff they can break apart and that smaller stuff can fly apart and you can analyze the trajectory of pieces so an analysis of

the of the debris from the collision could help understand what these particles consist of that's the whole idea of particle accelerators and one particle in particular that was of special interest when the project was started with the higgs boson there's the so-called standard model in particle physics where which claims that there should exist a hypothetical particle called higgs boson that would explain why all other particles have mass so without this hypothetical article it was uh difficult or impossible in the standard model of particle physics to explain why particles have mass the existence of this boson

was predicted in 1964 and it's interesting because well due to the logic of falsification in science we knew that if the boson does not exist then chances are the standard model in particle physics is false and that's a very uh crucial thing to find out so obviously scientists were very interested in testing the existence of the higgs boson but the problem is that it's not it's not observable it's not not easy to see it's a subatomic particle so one needs to collide other particles at a very high speed for the higgs boson to even show

itself and this is why it was so important to find higgs boson and to try to design a way that will give us a chance to test its existence it was finally found in 2012 in the large hadron collider it was a big deal as you might imagine because that's unprecedented support for the standard model in article physics but what's important what's interesting about this whole story is what the tremendous effort this was decades of work and billions of dollars went into large hadron collider it was all done to test one hypothesis well to be

fair the collider didn't test one hypothesis only multiple theories tested in the collider but this one was prominent in many respects so the knowledge of the higgs boson would never have been obtained without the use of the hydro collider material tools which kind of supports the claim here but it also seems like uh because the project is so tremendous and should we wish to collide particles at even a greater speed and analyze even tinier debris it's becoming next to impossible it seems like we're reaching the limits of usefulness of material tools we have to build

this enormous machine to test the the kind of theories that we have now at some point probably beyond a certain point it would no longer be practically possible to test our theories our theories will become so uh niche and so specific that they will they will become untestable because it will be impossible to build the machine that can run that kind of experiment so i'm thinking maybe that's the kind of point i will try to make that this example shows that material tools are very important indeed because without the large hadron collider we wouldn't we

wouldn't have we would never have obtained uh knowledge about the higgs boson anything about particle physics for that matter but the example also shows limitations of material tools because it's so enormous it's hard to imagine that we can build a real an even bigger machine even more complicated machine than that so it seems like there could be thresholds in the use of material tools knowledge production that we will not be able to cross i decided as my second object it should say second not third to take the large hadron collider and i'm just going to

use this image that is uh in public domain from from cern itself i think this shows the inside of one of the sections of the large hadron collider before the central element was installed so it shows the eight big magnets that surround the central elements of the collider so uh the lhc will become a second object it tests theories in particle physics it costs a tremendous amount of effort and it took 48 years to confirm the existence of the higgs boson that will be my real life real world context behind the object how am i

going to explain the link well i will say that material tools are very important in obtaining knowledge about the world around us without tools like this we simply don't have the means to get knowledge about particles however we seem to be approaching some limit or threshold of what material tools are capable of and in terms of justification exhibition of the object in terms of justification of the inclusion of the object in my exhibition uh it needs to be noted that the object brings out two extra points that i haven't made before one point is that

material tools are pretty important in knowing the world around us not just our internal world so to say and the second point is that they appear to have the limits so let's go over to my third object continuing the same logic i want to use something that brings even further arguments into the picture so i don't want to repeat the things i already said with the inclusion of my objects and note that my first two all obviously linked to knowledge and technology as a theme so maybe i can keep that in mind and try to

keep it consistent it would be nice my third one is from knowledge and technology too although that is not entirely necessary so far so far i have said that material tools are very important in producing knowledge about the world their power is not endless they may be important but at some point it may become impossible to build them these two points i have made with my second object i have also said that material tools can even produce knowledge that has been considered inherently human such as poetry at this point i'm making with my first object

um i could consider swapping the order of the two objects in the commentary that i write actually i can start with the second object and then go over to the first object start with the large hadron collider and then i will go over to the ai generated poem and then i will have this sequence of points to explain in my commentary which seems a bit more logical anyway let's go over to the third object as i said it should add something new to these three points it should add a particular contribution uh once again showing

an excerpt from the uh tlk exhibition assessment instrument um i'm thinking about it again and i realized that so far i have been saying that material tools are important and i have been doing something remotely related to areas of knowledge such as the arts with the ia generated poem and probably natural sciences with the large hadron collider so i want to to look at to look at things from a different angle this time to explore some other perspective or some other dimension of the prompt and i want to argue that material tools are not important

or maybe even harmful i don't know how yet but if if that was possible that would be awesome because that would add a nice fourth argument to my flow of arguments i can probably look at everyday knowledge situations as well personal knowledge so to say because so far i have been looking at areas of shared knowledge such as natural science something we produce as big knowledge communities so maybe it's time for me to look at knowledge that i have as an individual nowhere as well in my everyday situations so start thinking about what kind of

technology do we use in our everyday lives that takes me to thinking about taking pictures and tourists and go somewhere and take pictures and i think what if i argue that when you take a picture when you go somewhere as a tourist and you take loads of pictures you're kind of missing out on the experiences and maybe it deprives you of some important first-hand experiences of the thing and you are taking pictures instead of living what you are seeing maybe i can argue about something on those lines i do some research online but i hit

a dead end because apparently it's not it's not the case it's my misconception there's some research that shows that if you take pictures of the location that you're visiting as a tourist it actually helps you remember the visual aspect of that situation better but it's not apparently that simple and i just uncover one of the misconceptions i had so i abandoned that idea with photography but while i was researching stuff like negative impact or photography it brought up some articles related to selfies it's a huge deal help people have become obsessed with selfies and it

has had a bunch of detrimental effects so i decided to explore this a bit further it's kind of an unexpected direction for me but i still do a bit of reading and one article in particular catches my eye the article argues that selfies distort the proportions of our face that they make our nose appears thirty percent larger than it actually is and the article argues that my selfie when you take it close to my sight to my face due to the way the camera the lens in the camera is constructed but my selfie distorts the

face and i i i don't actually look like what i see in my own selfie i start researching further and reading this article and i find out that plastic surgeons have been reporting a sharp increase in the number of patients who want to go through surgery well mostly to do a nose job because they don't like the way they look at selfies most of these patients at research shows don't realize that selfies distort their face they believe that's what they look like they believe that that's how big their nose is uh and plastic surgeons even

started using special software that reverses the distortion and returns normal proportions to a selfie in an attempt to prevent people from making surgery decisions they would later regret psychologists have even invented a term for this condition snapchat dysmorphia and it all started with an article published in the journal of a medical the journal of american medical association facial plastic surgery uh the name of the article you can see on the screen and i'm thinking maybe i can include this screenshot cloud article as my third object it's words article names of nasal distortion and short distance

photographs a selfie effect it's the article that discovered the article that describes the research that discovered the selfie effect in 2018 uh and there we go my third object will be boards article and the facial plastic surgery journal the real world context is that the article reflects the concern that selfies just face but patients don't realize it and therefore they seek plastic surgery my link to the prompt will be that material tools such as cameras are indeed important and they do play a big role in our lives but we need to remember that in certain

ways they can also distort our knowledge and produce some negative consequences and we should be aware of these distortions which it seems we're not right now and finally how will i justify the inclusion of the object in my exhibition well i said previously that material tools are important but they have a limit that was with my large hadron collider example i said previously that material tools are so important that they are taking over human territory that was my aai generated poem example and with this particular object they seem to be saying that material tools can

also be harmful so we need to be aware it seems like a nice addition to the flow of arguments so i'm pretty satisfied at this point so looking back this is a collection of my objects as you can see two of them are digital uh a screenshot of the abstract of the article published in the journal of facial plastic surgery and a screenshot from a website uh containing an ai generated poem it is allowed to have digital objects like that as long as they have a specific real-world context behind them so to look back at

the thinking process that was involved in this particular exhibition sample i started with some examples that were considered in class and then i just went along the road of free search uh i think uh on reflection it has been the easiest way to find the first object so far are one as compared to my first two exhibition samples i'm just using an object that has been discussed in class and i'm just drawing inspiration from that object the trick was to select an object and just set my mind on it to not think any further just

focus on that object of research around it i think it really worked i used one lesson i picked an object that was discussed in that lesson the ai generated chapter of harry potter then i explored other similar objects they found one i liked that was the ari poem then i chose the ia prompt that is most suitable to this object i formulated the link and from the link i started thinking about what extra dimensions of the prompt i can explore and that particular reasoning guided my search for the other two objects so i think from

this point on i started using the top down approach again but i feel like it really works for me to ensure that the three objects can be nicely the inclusion of the three objects can be nicely justified uh in the commentary my source of inspiration has been the the textbook lessons luckily the book is full of cool examples uh we have examples in each and every lesson that is designed to be used in class we also have the special exhibition sections at the start of every unit and after every unit will come back to the

exhibition and analyze it on a new level incorporating all the new concepts that have been learned i'll have them back to exhibition section there let's mark what i have got so far as you remember i'm interested to know what could potentially go wrong what criticism i can expect from examiners i do think that i did a decent job again but i also want to know if there's anything that can potentially be identified as a weakness and yeah the common questions that i ask myself are could it be that the context behind my objects is not

specific enough could they say that my objects are not linked well enough to the prompt could they say that the inclusion of my objects in the exhibition is not justified well enough and could they say that my exhibition is not based on one of the themes uh well let's go through these potential objections one by one so could it be that the context behind my objects is not specific enough well if you look at the collider it does have a whole story behind it it's not just a generic particle accelerator it's one of its kind

the largest machine in the world and the one whose design was heavily associated with the search for the higgs boson it was instrumental in supporting the standard model standard model of particle physics so it did play a tremendous role in article physics so it does have a rich context behind it the ia generated power is also not just one of many poems that it could have found online i did not pick it randomly it was taken from a website it has some personal context behind it it was taken from a website that i took uh

to see if the computer can fool me uh tricked me into believing that certain poems were written by human beings i totally could so the poem this particular poem is an example of a problem that fooled me in the turing test that struck me as very human-like so i thought it was tricked by a human being but i was surprised to find out that it wasn't that's the personal context behind this object finally the journal article its context is that it was the first research to show that selfies can distort our faith this was quite

eye-opening evidence and it may have changed the practice of plastic surgery in many ways it uncovered that people commonly seek plastic surgery for very wrong reasons again it's not just one of the articles about the selfie effect it's the first article ever published that established the existence of selfie effect as such let's go go over to the second thing could they say that my objects are not linked well enough to the prompt well the important words in the prompt were material tools important and production slash acquisition of knowledge the collider is a material tool uh

i don't think we can doubt that it's the biggest material tool ever produced it is used for production of knowledge because that's we as humanity produce knowledge about particles so in this way the collider seems to be linked to the prompt the poem is also the creation of a material tool of an ai computer algorithm uh if poetry is knowledge then apparently it can be produced by a material tool and if that is so it makes material tools extremely important in the production of this kind of knowledge so that's how i link the poem to

the prompt i do see one weakness here the weak link here is is the suggestion that poetry is a kind of knowledge is it some people argue that knowledge is not contained in the poem itself it may be contained in the in how the audience perceives the poem or it may be even contained in the intentions of the artist the poet who created the poem there are different viewpoints here but i feel like because there are different viewpoints and no correct answer i'm also quite justified in assuming that the poem can be treated as a

form of knowledge um and finally the article explains how cameras which are undoubtedly material tools distort our everyday knowledge uh such as the image of the self so they do uh affect the acquisition of knowledge about ourselves uh it seems to me that everything is pretty well linked to the prompt here perhaps except for the power which is a bit tricky i don't think it can be marked down for uh for suggesting that a poem is a form of knowledge in the context of this particular exhibition but do let me know if you think otherwise

uh how do i justify the inclusion well i've said a lot about that in this presentation already the approach i have taken to justifying the inclusion is to explain what unique contribution each of the objects makes i'm using the language of the tok exhibition assessment instrument here the collider demonstrates that material tools are important in obtaining knowledge about the world but it also demonstrates that we may be approaching the limits of their usefulness the poem demonstrates that material tools can even take over knowledge territory that traditionally belonged exclusively to humans such as poetry knowledge of

our own inner worlds inner soul and the article demonstrated our everyday knowledge can be negatively impacted by the use of material tools i feel like the first and the third here are pretty straightforward and the second one is a little bit more of a stretch i feel like it will still work because the link is just justified and the inclusion is justified but do let me know if you think otherwise saying that the ai generated poem is actually a weak object in this context it seems to tick the box in the assessment instrument that says

there is a strong justification of the particular contribution that each individual object makes to the exhibition and finally the themes can they say that my exhibition is not based on one of the themes as you know there's a strong recommendation that vib makes that exhibition should be based on one of the themes the ib has also clarified that the purpose of this recommendation is not to is just to make the object selection process easier for the students and they have clarified that if objects are not based on a theme students will not be penalized for

that in the in my previous two exhibition samples they didn't worry too much about the themes as you might have seen but in this one i decided to stick to a theme if possible i feel like i have succeeded and all my three objects are linked to knowledge and technology but again it's not a big deal the ib says that starting with a particular theme may make um object selection easier in my own experience i found that it really doesn't what does make object selection easier is choosing one particular lesson on one particular topic within

a unit that i have studied so it so happened that the lesson that i picked for this exhibition sample belonged to the unit knowledge and technology but i feel like it could have belonged to any other unit as well so starting with that particular lesson and with the concept with the object investigated in that lesson it gave me a good starting point to look for other objects and as i mentioned already i feel like in this third exhibition sample the selection of the first object might have been the easiest uh so far at least in

my experience uh in this exhibition i followed the recommendation yeah i've said all that already and finally as usual i invite you to give my exhibition a mark and to justify it i'm open to opinions and i'm interested in various perspectives because we're all in the same boat we're trying to decipher the iv assessment criteria this is a new syllabus and i'm sure that our understanding will be crystallized as we're going on thank you for watching and see you next time