IB TOK Exhibition Example #2

hello again this is tok exhibition sample 2 from semantic education and that's the plan of this video that i'm going to walk you through a quick reminder for the tok exhibition and the new tok course students are required to do the following they need to select three real world objects they need to link them to one of the 35 knowledge questions given in the guide they need to create a written commentary of up to 950 words about all these three objects in total and the commentary for each of the objects must include according to the

criteria three things uh there needs to be an identification of the object and its specific real world context there needs to be an explanation of the link between the object and the ia prompt and there needs to be a justification for the inclusion of the object of the object in the exhibition there's a better uh concise concise introduction into the nature requirements of the tok exhibition that we made earlier in the form of an animated video please do check it out on our channel um in the previous video i already created the first eok exhibition

sample and the whole idea is that i'm trying to demonstrate not just the final product but the whole thinking process that goes into it uh because the ib gives you a clear set of requirements for the final product but the problem is it's not entirely clear how to to get to that destination where you have an awesome tok exhibition in the first video i started with a prompt and i tried thinking about the prompt on an abstract level and i worked my way down to the specific objects and they called this the top down process

you can see the three objects that i selected for my first exhibition sample in that video if you haven't seen it please see it in this video i'm going to try a different approach to creating a uk exhibition i'll call it a bottom-up approach instead of starting with the knowledge question i will actually start with selecting an object and then i will try to find a prompt that best fits into the object uh there will be more videos where i will be trying even more different approaches to creating tok exhibitions stay tuned so uh some

starting points obviously because this time i want to start with finding an object and then selecting the most suitable ia prompt for the object the key problem for me is how do i select the first object where do i even start so one thing i remember from the tok requirements is that the object has to be something specific it needs to be embedded in a specific real-life context and the ib is quite strict about that apparently it can't be a generic object like a teddy bear is not okay but a particular teddy bear that i

used to have as a child and that it grew emotionally attached to is better so how do i select the first object then to demonstrate my thinking process this is what happened first i started just looking around myself and noticing a lot of things that might work for my exhibition and none of them worked i dismissed a lot of ideas i spent about a day think of just looking around myself and trying to see and notice various objects and trying to think if i could use those objects in a tok exhibition potentially and a lot

of things didn't work for example i was just looking through my daughter's toys my daughter is three years old currently and sometimes actually quite interesting some sometimes a bizarre and you would think you could you could spend uh quite some time discussing why these toys are so bizarre what kind of thinking went into them at the same time toys are generic mass-produced objects and there's not really much context around them i also looked at stuff like i actually googled most bizarre things uh just to expose myself to more things i found lots of lists lists

are very popular on the internet like 15 most bizarre things you could find on amazon for example a lot of such lists contain items that you can buy so consumer items some of them are kind of great they're quite sill-provoking for example i saw a device that fixes your coffee cup to a handrail on the subway train and actually contemplating contemplated basing my exhibition on an object like that or an umbrella hat but again i kind of struggled connecting these mass-produced objects mass-produced consumer objects to the concept of knowledge so i had to dismiss these

ideas as well i kept thinking i remember this recommendation made in the guide to base your exhibition on one of the themes so i thought maybe my field of search is too wide so i can just as well narrow it down i randomly picked knowledge and technology and i decided to focus my search for an object in this area and that prompted me to look for something interesting or unusual in some inventions so i thought i'm looking for a thing and it's connected with technology so it's probably some sort of invention so i started googling

most bizarre inventions and similar uh search queries i found more lists essentially none of them worked but i was as i was browsing through these lists i suddenly stumbled upon inventions for baby care and then they suddenly remembered something i read about some weird baby beds that used to be uh that that were in circulation in the past i i actually already had that knowledge in my background it was just not active in my memory so it just didn't occur to me that i could use that um knowledge of mind when creating an tok exhibition

but this kind of random search prompted me to think about it again so i started googling history of cribs to refresh my memory and then i found a fascinating story about baby cages baby cages were actually not the products i had in mind but as i was reading about history of crims they attracted my attention um and that's it i decided to use baby a baby cage as my first object i found several i'm gonna tell you uh in the next slide what the baby cage is it's quite fascinating uh just a disclaimer i found

several old pictures of a baby cage with an actual baby in it but all these pictures i couldn't use them in this video because they're all copyrighted obviously this won't be a problem for you because in a tok exhibition you don't have to worry about that as long as you cite your sources um but instead i found the the next best thing i found a picture from one of the first patents of a baby cage all patents by u.s law are in public domain so uh images from patents can be freely used um let me

tell you about what a baby cage is then a baby cage or also called a window crib is essentially a crib that is designed to be suspended outside the window so that your child sleeps outside literally you just put the crib outside the window and close your window and the child will be just hanging outside of your flat these cribs became popular at the start of the 20th century after a certain dr luther emmett holt popularized in his books popularized the idea of airing babies that is allowing babies to sleep outside in fresh air even

in cold temperatures according to him exposing babies to fresh air outside systematically produces lots of beneficial effects for their health both physical health and mental health and general stamina so he widely advocated for airing babies ventilating babies reportedly according to some articles that they read recently even eleanor roosevelt used the baby cage for her child anna and it ended badly because her neighbors saw that and they threatened to call the authorities on her for child abuse or something like that so as you can see it was not always widely accepted but the ideas became a

bit more popular but at the start of the 20th century and people wanted to find solutions not everyone has a garden so people living in city flats were looking for a solution and that was the age when the first patents appeared such as emma reed's patent of a portable baby cage the picture that you see in the on the slide is actually from that fairy patent as i said i didn't include an actual old photograph of a baby cage in this video because they're all copyrighted you could do that in your tok exhibition draw some

links to articles containing these images in the description below this video so please feel free to check them out and see the baby cage in action so to speak um so that's it that's my first object i kind of like it i thought there's something in it it will do um it's interesting it has context uh it's unusual uh i will use it as the first object in my tok exhibition so now i need to look for the suitable prompt now with my bottom up approach i start looking at the list of 35 prompts to

see if the baby cage links nicely to any of them and it feels like the best candidate is this one it's one of the last prompts on the list in what ways do values affect the production of knowledge i wreck my brain a little and i think maybe i can argue that sometimes our values prevent us from producing potentially useful knowledge like you know airing the claims that airing babies leads to a lot of beneficial effects on their health is a big claim it needs to be tested researched and we will never know unless we

try with with with some number of babies but if we don't try because we feel like it's not acceptable practice to place your baby outside like suspend the baby outside the window then we will never know maybe something along those lines i know that the use of baby cages was discontinued quite quickly interestingly they were used the longest in london but in new york for example they were discontinued almost immediately so inventions like this and research in that area was not a frequent occurrence at that time probably because people did not feel too well about

placing those their babies outside in this manner so it kind of illustrates the idea that our values such as caring about our babies can sometimes prevent potentially useful knowledge from being gained and i feel like it's kind of interesting it's an interesting twist so why don't i keep that as my link to the prompt so decided then i will use that as my ia prompt and i will use a baby cage as my first object so the first object will be an image from emma reed's patent of a portable baby cage uh or if i

was not bound by copyright issues i would have used one of the old photographs of the actual baby cage uh the context is that these baby cages were suggested as a way to keep babies healthy by airing them but this practice was quickly discontinued due to some hard feelings produced in a lot of parents how am i going to explain the link to the ia prompt in what ways do values affect the production of knowledge well i can say that vines can prevent us from gaining potentially useful knowledge before baby cages could become popular and

before we could understand if airing babies enhances their health the use of baby cages was already discontinued so we never got to know how am i going to justify the inclusion of the object in my exhibition well my object shows that values sometimes create an obstacle to obtaining knowledge that is potentially useful all right now over to the second object uh i have the first one i need to select the second one how do i do that um i remember about the recommendation amazing the 2k guide to base the exhibition on one of the themes

i'm not worrying about this too much now even if my second object is not based on one of those on the same theme as my first object it's not going to be a big problem i don't want to limit myself in that way but i could still try looking for another example of technology just to kind of give myself a sense of direction so having that in mind i start thinking well there's another another requirement that i have to meet i will need to justify the inclusion of my second object uh into the exhibition so

my second object in terms of the message that it sends to the visitor of my exhibition needs to add something new to what i have already said and i have said that sometimes values can prevent us from obtaining potentially useful knowledge so what else can i say about the role of values in knowledge production i feel like what i have said that the first object is a bit one-sided it's not like values always prevent us from obtaining knowledge i can also argue that values drive our knowledge in a way they motivate us to pursue things

so maybe i should try finding an object like an example of technology some sort of invention that captures the idea that values can drive um the production of knowledge can drive innovation so with these things in mind i start thinking what do we humans care about and how does how does it motivate our knowledge or research because what's the value of value is something that we humans attach subjective importance to so what what do we attach subjective importance to what do we care about and from there my thinking leads me to thinking about war because

i realize that the most progressive inventions in human history have been made in the name of war our best innovations come from the desire to be better than our enemy to essentially to better others at killing to protecting ourselves so i'm thinking maybe i can find an object that represents some crazy military innovation that was way ahead of its time and i can argue that there we go some values of survival and being better than our enemy enabled us to um fast track the production of knowledge in certain war-related areas and these were amazing innovations

that were very much ahead of their time now i feel like i'm on the right track so i start looking for um for for what i said essentially i started googling weapon innovations that changed history and that that brings me a lot of lists so now i feel like i just need to pick one really and i remember that it needs to be something with a specific real life context so i'm just looking for a uh innovation in weaponry that has a specific real life context that is easy to explain and i end up picking

the atlatl i'm hoping i pronounced it correctly and at little is a spear-throwing device i read an article explaining how this simple device has made a huge difference in the life of early humans it was a genius invention that helps our civilization to become what it has become essentially it's just essentially just a stick that allows you to throw your spear a little bit a little bit farther uh but it was a it was a game-changing invention in his travel species uh that wasn't one of the athletes um excavated look like essentially it's a stick

carved out of wood a bone uh the oldest one that has been discovered was made in france around and a half thousand years ago it's pretty impressive uh the way it works is you grab the handle and you place your spear on on top of the device and then with a swift motion you just throw the spear with a with the athletal essentially it gives you a bit of extra leverage so because of that you can throw the spear a little bit farther and it means that you can attack dangerous game animals from a long

distance without approaching them too closely and endangering yourself so we can now hunt big animals like mammoths without endangering ourselves too much and that changed history for our species apparently but if you look at this kind of um of an invention and if you think that this was invented seventeen point five uh seventeen and a half thousand years ago it's pretty impressive what primitive people of that time were able uh to achieve in terms of knowledge production and inventing new ways of hunting and it's it's probably true that the best innovations of that time were

all related to to being able to kill animals better so for my second object i'm gonna use the atlatl uh i'm going to say that it's a highly innovative device for throwing spears it was invented seven seventeen and a half thousand years ago there was game changing in hunting and survival in general for early humans how am i going to link it to the ia prompt well i will explain that values may determine what knowledge we choose to seek that survival was the main value of primitive people that's what we attached subjective importance to surviving

eating so it essentially drove their knowledge efforts their research if you will and the most innovative tools were the ones designed to kill that's not only true for primitive people i feel like it's also true for the whole history of humanity on the whole how am i going to justify the inclusion of my object in the exhibition well my first object showed that values may be an obstacle and with my second object i kind of argue that they can also be a motivating factor or a driving force of obtaining knowledge they can determine which fields

we are willing to pursue which fields we're willing to investigate and put our effort in all right it seems promising at this point but i need the third object so i stop and think and i'm thinking what's missing so far i have said that values values may sometimes be an obstacle for obtaining knowledge and i have also said that in other circumstances they may be a driving force again i remember that i will have to justify the inclusion of my object in the exhibition so my third object needs to add something new to the idea

that my exhibition already conveys for that reason i'm thinking apart from these two effects i should try to think of any other way in which values may affect knowledge i keep tracking my brain and one idea comes to mind again summarizing what i've already said values can be an obstacle values can be a driving force what else can i say i realized that so in the first two points i said that values can be an obstacle in producing knowledge or values can be a driving force in determining which knowledge will be produced but i also

realize that even one knowledge is already produced it is there so we have some data values may determine the way i perceive that knowledge or the way i see the data so maybe values can also be seen as a filter through which we perceive knowledge or something along those lines i want to argue that even when certain facts are already obtained our values may determine the way we see the facts and that the same facts may be seen differently if values are different so i just need to find an object that illustrates this kind of

idea i want to argue about that because it seems like a good connection to the ia prompts that will complement my other two links nicely so really enough i now have the connection to the ia prompt but i don't have an object yet so start looking for something that would convey that that thought and suddenly an idea occurs to me an example comes to my mind i remember from my previous knowledge that there's this thing in psychology called projective tests the most famous one of these is rorschach's inkblot test i'm sure you've heard about it

the idea behind those tests is that they give you a vague unstructured stimulus and different people see different things in that in that inkblot the idea is that the reason they see different things in the ink plot is because they have different personalities and different internal conflicts that are torturing them so they see what they want to see they see what they are predisposed to see i do a little bit more reading on the internet i find the original rorschach's ink blood test it consisted of 10 cards and i decided to settle on one card

just to make this example a bit more specific it's card 4 from his original temp card inc blood test i read a little bit about how this card is interpreted and that's a quotation from a website dedicated to rorschach the card is often perceived as being associated with a male figure which is why the card is often called the father card i also remember reading in previously some research associated with using this card in diagnosing various things including things like male homosexuality uh i remember reading in chaplain and chapman 1969 for my psychology course that

it was shown that male homosexuals more frequently than other people give certain responses when they see this current namely they more frequently see a contorted or threatening human or animal for example they give such responses as a horrid beast or a giant with shrunken arms if you see a giant with shrunken arms here it doesn't necessarily mean that you have homosexual inclinations but it is apparently true that statistically speaking uh responses like a giant with shrunken arms are more prevalent in groups of uh homosexual subjects as compared to heterosexual subjects but for my reasons for

for for the purposes of tok exhibition what's important is that different people see the same ink plot but they report seeing different things because presumably the different people have associated attach subjective importance to different details and different aspects of their lives there we go my third object will be george hacks inc blood test created in 1921 card four rorschach noticed that different people project different meanings onto the blocks he hypothesized that this reflects their deep conflicts or their core values and he was using that to diagnose the conflicts and values of his patients how am

i going to explain the link to the prompt well as i said when two people have different sets of values they are likely to see different things even when they are exposed to the same data it probably doesn't only apply to separate individuals it probably applies to societies or even time periods of paradigms uh how am i going to justify why i have included this object in my exhibition well it adds very nicely to the two points that i made with my two previous two objects uh i have said with my first object that the

values may be an obstacle i have said with my second object that values may be a driving force for the production of knowledge and i seem to be saying with my third object that even when knowledge is already produced values may decide what we make of it let's look back at the entire exhibition so that's the overview of all the three objects that i have importantly they're all in public domain so i don't need to cite my sources here because it's allowed to present them without citations but um it's it's it's important to cite the

sources in your tok exhibition because likely you will use some copyrighted material to look back at the thinking process that i have been using here i was trying to approach this exhibition in a bottom up kind of way so i started with choosing an object and then thinking about the ia prompt that will be most suitable for them however you would have noticed that this logic only actually worked in the beginning when i was choosing my first object the the window crib the baby cage and after that after i had my first object i kind

of switched back to top-down approach again because um i first thought about what kind of idea i would like to add to my exhibition on the abstract level and then i was selecting a trying to find an object to illustrate or exemplify that idea i feel now after doing this exercise that the top-down approach will be kind of inevitable at some point and the difference between bottom-up and top-down will actually lie mostly in the selection of the first object and maybe the first two objects but at some points because you need to justify the inclusion

of your objects in your exhibition you will probably have to switch to to abstract thinking first and then try trying to find objects that better support your abstract reasoning um obviously another thing i'm thinking about it will be very important to write the explanations in the actual commentary in a very concise and clear way for example a lot will depend on how exactly the links between the objects and the prompts are articulated and for this you need to be comfortable with the concepts such as values or production of knowledge in my exploration i also i

have brought up other concepts as well such as interpretation progress innovation data usefulness of knowledge all these things the tok concepts and the ok examiners obviously will be looking at your commentary and making a judgment about how comfortably and how appropriately you are using these 2k concepts thankfully we have this awesome new tok textbook that explains concepts really well not only um does it teach you uh concepts in every lesson it teaches you how to approach concepts you have never encountered before in a way that will allow you to understand them deeply and systematically let's

go over to marking them so the exhibition is created let's mark it um as usual i'm thinking what could potentially go wrong i was trying to do a good job i think i managed to do a decent job but i'm trying to foresee what criticisms i can potentially expect from examiners for example could it be that examiners might say that the context behind my objects is not specific enough or could they say that my objects are not linked well enough to the prompt or could they say that the inclusion of my objects in the exhibition

is not justified well enough or could they say that my exhibition is not based on one of the themes so i'm going to try and address these four points one by one in terms of real life context could it be that the context behind my object is not specific enough the ib seems to be very very strict and adamant about the objects having some specific real life context i thought about it and i think i don't know how to make my objects more specific if you take a baby cage yes it was a mass-produced object

at that time but still it has a very specific context to it that i have explained in this video if i wanted to make it even more specific than that i could have said this is eleanor roosevelt's baby cage but i don't think this move would be necessary it's not adding anything to my argument in terms of how the baby cage connects to the ia prompt so i feel like um my contexts are coming through pretty nicely for all three objects and actually when i was doing that i found it quite challenging to describe the

context behind the three objects briefly the first version of this presentation was actually quite a bit longer than what you're currently seeing because i had to cut a bit of context out of my explanations so that suggests that there seems to be enough context behind my objects and my challenge is not to spend too many words on it not to waste the word count let me know if you think differently now in terms of linking to the prompt can they say that my objects are not linked well enough to the prompt well i have tried

to explain it to explain it as much as possible obviously a lot will depend on how i actually articulate this in the actual written commentary but i have explained for example that production of knowledge may be impaired if certain ideas are not deemed acceptable so i linked the baby cage for instance to production of knowledge by saying that we could gain new knowledge and new information about the effects of airing on baby development but we didn't because we felt bad about placing babies outside like that so we never kind of this prevented us from getting

knowledge that could potentially be useful and in that sense values these subjective imports were attached to babies prevented us from from from producing some knowledge mostly i have also managed to talk about the production of knowledge the ia prompt talks about production of knowledge and i also talked about production of knowledge producing knowledge of effects of airing on babies producing new ways to kill malice mammoths producing subjective interpretations of the same data and our knowledge of some somebody's personality based on those subjective interpretations i have also linked to the term value i have defined values

broadly in my exhibition like i have defined it implicitly but i may define it more explicitly in the actual written commentary i defined it i seem to have defined values as anything that we humans attach subjective importance to obviously i should be explicit in my written commentary itself and i should explain straight away how i understand these terms so that the examiner understands that i'm quite clear in terms of connections between the objects in the ia prompt but am i allowed to have my own understanding of concepts i think i am i'm perfectly allowed to

do that i'm not supposed to take the definition of value from a textbook but from a dictionary and stick to that i can figure out my own definition the most important thing is that i am consistent with what i define as a value and i am consistent with what i define as a production of as production of knowledge and i am explicit in showing that my objects link to uh the to the prompt the way i understand it um again i think um i did a decent job linking objects to the to the prompt but

let me know if you think otherwise because i'm interested in finding potential drawbacks or or traps or pitfalls here thirdly could examiners say that the inclusion of my objects in the exhibition is not justified well enough well as in as in the first video uh i took the approach of justifying the inclusion to explain what unique contribution each of the objects makes so for me the inclusion of an object in the exhibition is justified if my second object does not repeat the same does not convey the same idea that my first object has already conveyed

and it sends my three objects illustrate the ia prompt more holistically because they they bring out different aspects different dimensions of it so i think i try to be quite explicit in uh making sure that it happens my baby cage not my baby cage but the the image of the baby cage demonstrates that our values such as all babies are important can create an obstacle for the production of knowledge uh such as what are the effects of airing on baby development the atlatl the spirit thrower demonstrates that our values such as survival killing for food

just kind of living maybe a driving force in the production of knowledge because they challenged us to invent new ways to hunt which were very revolutionary for their time and the inkblot demonstrates that our values such as motivations internal conflicts and areas of focus influence the way we interpret data and even if when two people see the same data their interpretation of the same data set may be different so the three objects seem to highlight three different ways in which values may influence knowledge and that seems to be what the prompt is asking for and

that's how i have justified the inclusion of these three objects in my exhibition so i think i'm fine once again if you think otherwise let me know finally it seems can they say that my exhibition is not based on one of the themes i brought this up in the first exhibition sample already and i'm bringing this up again as you know the ib strongly recommends basing the exhibition on one of the themes but um in in both the instances of creating a sample tok exhibition i found it pretty difficult to stick to this recommendation i

actually found it more limiting than empowering in my first exhibition sample in this exhibition sample i made a conscious effort to follow this recommendation and that's why in selecting the first object i actually focused on a theme to narrow down the choice that was done for my convenience i feel like it has helped because when i was just randomly looking for an object to use and looking at all those lists that they found online it was a bit overwhelming but once i decided i will be looking at something in knowledge and technology that brought me

to the idea of looking at invent bizarre inventions of the past and from there it was quite a straight path so it allowed me to narrow down one object conveniently in selecting the second object i also told myself to look for another piece of technology i knew that i didn't have to it's a strong recommendation but it's not requirement and you don't have to explain how your object is linked to a theme in the actual written commentary but i chose to do so for convenience when i found the the image of the atlatl the spear

thrower it could be categorized as knowledge and technology but maybe also as knowledge in indigenous societies i don't really know it's kind of ambiguous but it doesn't matter in the long run maybe it is knowledge and technology after all but in the in my choice of third object i was no longer bothered about connecting it to a theme because for me the the leading uh my leading motivation was to select an object in such a way that will allow me to justify its inclusion in the exhibition most efficiently so i was thinking about the message

that i'm trying to convey and that's a lot more important to me than making sure that my third object also comes from knowledge and technology so it doesn't the inkblot is probably not it doesn't probably belong to knowledge and technology i would place it under knowledge and the knower but again i don't think it actually really matters because there's no requirement to explicitly explain the link to one of the themes in the commentary so this link is not assessed a link to a theme helped me with narrowing down the choice of my first object but

that's where its function ended and i feel like that's how we should approach this strong recommendation of the ib in conclusion i invite you to give my exhibition a mark and to justify the mark uh argue with my reasoning if you think uh i provided some arguments along the way if you think otherwise let me know your reasons because i'm genuinely interested in them i'm interested in your opinions because we're all currently in the same boat it's a new syllabus so we will spend some time trying to design for the ib assessment criteria and trying

to understand how exactly the new tok syllabus actually translates into practice uh watch out for the next videos and thank you for watching see you next time