Presentation Topics

[Guest krazymoo]

For my presentation, I did it on the question/knowledge issue "Is our perception of beauty killing us?" Persuaded to the topic by Dove's video, evolution of beauty, It was an interesting topic, but I am now questioning if it would be acceptable as a real IB topic.

For future reference (i.e. my two siblings) what are some non-standard questions/issues that might be actually interesting to research and do for a presentation.

[Guest Jeyradan]

Well, we almost died on our presentation, because instead of actually choosing a question, we basically covered the entirety of TOK in an hour. AND we did it in play form. WITH PUNS.

We got 75%, but we pointed out that we had, in fact, answered a number of questions during the play... he raised it to 80%. Don't do what we did.

[Dooga]

Hey, 80% is 16/20, which is a pretty good mark. It's a B at least.

I'm doing a topic like... "How do we know if democracy works?" or something similar. It's controversial, subjective and might be difficult to implement creatively... but I think that it's pretty easy to manage because the idea is something that fits TOK quite well. Anyone have any suggestions or anything I should know about?

[NikkiGrad09]

Some topics that we used at our school are:

- Torture - good or bad (in short) - legality, ethics, morals,

- Should there be a set standard for age limits? (ie: drinking = 21, license = 16, voting = 18, or have a year where you get all rights, etc)

- Should IB be more flexible?

- Gay marriage - legality, ethics, views from different generations, etc.

They were all interesting to watch as well.

[Bandev]

I did mine on the worth of an artist's(Takashi Murakami) I loved it, doing it and researching it. Plus it got me a perfect score so I think that they are good topics to do.

[Guest Lily Bean]

Do not do abortion or euthanasia. Extremely cliched

[deissi]

a good idea is some aspect of how statistics is misused. That always raises TOK questions.

[callum]

Most TOK presentation topics are focused on ethical issues. They're great to do because they're so many implications and counter-claims to address. However, they are slightly over-used.

In choosing a topic, I think it's about how confident you are. If you do really well in TOK and are happy about your ability, be adventurous and choose a topic in an area that's not usually looked at: mathematics or human sciences. If not choose ethics. Ethics is really easy to find up to date statisitics, information and opinions to illustrate your argument.

[Ruan Chun Xian]

If you want good TOK topics, I suggest you read Jodi Picoult's books. Google her if you haven't heard of her but she writes about some really TOK issues - designer babies, mercy killing, seeing God, rape (what is defined as rape) etc. My TOK presentation was based on the issues in one of her books - My Sister's Keeper. Her books are usually really heavy emotionally but really full of TOK stuff. But if you haven't read her before I really wouldn't start with The Tenth Circle, it's not her best, IMO.

[cixelsyD]

A ton of ppl have done "do aliens exist" (including my ToK group) -- this one might be overused now

[runa]

Most TOK presentation topics are focused on ethical issues. They're great to do because they're so many implications and counter-claims to address. However, they are slightly over-used

you are right. try to look at current issues like the junta myanmmar.

[Mr. Shiver]

All the ones that have been previously mentioned as being overused I also agree with. Additionally, it's probably not a good idea to do a presentation on a very broad issue, such as beauty, but it would be better to zoom in on one aspect of it. For example, if it was the Dove commercial that attracted you to the topic of beauty, your issue could be something like "Does Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty go against the traditional human perception of beauty?" You could talk about language ("real", "beauty", "traditional"), perception, etc.