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Fourth Class 10/9
(Watched Episodes 4 and 5)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haythamhaor more about Alhazen (Episode 5, Music of the Spheres). Thanks to David for helping me discover more about this pioneer of science.
Third Class 10/2
(Watched Episode 4; read and discussed poems by Bronowski and Billy Collins.)
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Bronowski's poem "The Abacus and the Rose" ends with the word "spring". Among suggestion`s about what that word might mean in this poem, was that it might mean some force driving all the processes noted in the poem. If so, that force must be more complex than just a physical force (F = ma, to put in the language of basic physics). It must be a force that can create new things and new order from the materials in our messy universe. The force must be creative.
What is creativity? Is the universe inherently creative? Click HERE to read more about these questions.
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In discussing Collins's poem, someone mentioned inquiry learning, sometimes called inquiry-based learning. If these are new terms to you, they describe teaching methods that entail more exploration of questions, and reasoning toward answers, but less presenting (usually by lecture) of "factual" information. The end of all types of teaching is that students learn and understand and can use something new. Proponents of inquiry learning believe that students also learn more about how knowledge is made, and how to explore new subjects independently. For more, click HERE.
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Second Class, 9/25
(Watched the remainder of Episode 2 and then Episode 3.)
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Talked about blood groups ABO and Rh, using the diagram HERE, and about how blood types in early-arriving North American humans suggest times and sequence of arrival events.
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First Class, 9/18
(Watched Episode 1 and most of 2.)
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A student asked about how I was using the terms knowledge and truth.
from http://oneculture-reflections.blogspot.com/:
"Self-correction helps science to construct knowledge that is, in the words of philosopher John Searle (4), true, objective, and universal: true, despite all truth being subject to revision; objective, despite the presence of subjective elements in the judgments that accept it; universal (true in all times and places), despite having been discovered in specific instances. Self-correction makes science a more powerful process than philosophers of the past thought possible."
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