We have been investigating the origins of truth in our industries and challenging them epistemically. The most difficult part of this was the question, ‘what is my industry‘. (oh yeah and the ‘ology stuff, but more on that later).

Thinking about my industry and work history, I am going to exclude all the corporate training and freelance design that paid for those snowboarding holidays, the IT consultancy that bought the VW camper and just focus on the core of what I do and have done for some years, which is working with technology and design within Education. (let’s call it Learning Design).

Challenging truth & knowledge

“I’m a relaxed empiricist — I only believe something to be true if someone I know quite well tells me it happened.” – Bill Bailey

How much of our knowledge has it’s origins in hearsay, gossip or rumor. When you consider the overwhelming amount of information we are exposed to daily, I imagine, quite a lot.. This is a great starting point for the retrospective phase of the program and provides a good opportunity to think about our information sources.

Two new words to deal with this week:

Ontology - The study of the nature of being or existence and it’s categories, (What exists and how do we sort it)

Epistemology – The investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion, (Why is our opinion different to a researched/proven belief).

I have no idea how to use these words… ‘From an ontological view’, ‘ontologically speaking’, ‘it’s epistemical innit !!!’… Will have to practice these…