Inquiry and Research Services: General and Special Encyclopedias (1 of 2)

 A co-teacher referred to me a student he is supervising. This is for a Theory of Knowledge (TOK) task as the student is preparing for the TOK essay. My co-teacher has given me the background of the student. A few hours later, the student sent me an email explaining the specific task to be accomplished and the questions the student must answer. Having all this information helped me prepare for my meeting with the student.

First, I analyzed the task which is to define and explain knowledge from multiple disciplines namely, Socio-anthropology, Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy. I then focused on the questions the student must unpack which are the following:

Can there be knowledge that is independent of culture?

Discuss with reference to mathematics and one other area of knowledge.

What is knowledge?

To answer these questions, the student needs to know three concepts namely, knowledge, culture and mathematics as an area of knowledge. For this purpose, I planned on showing the student two kinds of encyclopedias namely, the general encyclopedia and the special encyclopedia. The former provides basic information on topics and different kinds of knowledge while the later, as the name suggest, has a specialized treatment in content as concentrates on the subject or disicpline.

We have a subscription to World Book Online so this will be used as a general reference.  For the special encyclopedia, I opted for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology.

Before diving into the design and contents of the online encyclopedia, I will provide an orientation on the different ways of using each kind to address an information need or answer questions for a task.