I really had no clue what epistemology was until this class, after reading our text it’s a branch of philosophy, but not knowing anything beyond that. Epistemology is the study of knowledge within a branch of philosophy. Epistemology tries to find the basic answers to questions about how the world is seen and knowledge gained from it. According to Rayner it’s the intake of and the way knowledge is taken in (Rayner, 2011). My thought on the meaning is to always question what we are taught.
After hours of research for a better understanding of epistemology, one that stuck was how some question the earth. A documentary on Netflix I recently watched had people believe the earth is flat while many like me believe it’s round.
One thing I was always taught was we are the only ones in the world. In the beginning I was all for it, but as I grew, I began to question everything I was taught. It seems as time passes and technology expands, we learn something new.
This makes me believe aliens are real. There are so many platforms now to access information and that is what becomes a shift. I remember being young and having to do research in encyclopedias. If I was lucky and it was safe, I could attend my local library and borrow books. Then once the computer was affordable, we got one. Dial-up was the worst if I must say so, and we couldn’t be on the phone either. The only search engines I can recall using was askjeeves.
com and msn.com to do homework.
Even though technology has changed knowledge still centers on questions. One main question is how we know what was taught or learned is true. Another is how what we believe is real in form or another. This particular topic is hard for me to understand but I do get the meaning. I was born in the 80’s and everything we learned is different from today. Knowledge is now learned from several things like phones, laptops, and tablets that we can take wherever we go (Nunes, 2009). Philosophers are not correct to be concerned with this shift, as I believe we are learning more than ever. Even my children are learning differently than I did, as teachers are adapting to this new style. Seems like in every school there is a smart board that can be written on. While during my time we had a projector focused on a wall, that we wrote on with expo pens. Now my children have access to the internet and other learning activities never afforded to my generation.
Knowledge is so important and although many cannot keep up, classes are now being taught. Some older adults can’t grasp this new technology and it’s understandable. My mother is having the hardest time learning her smartphone. Every other day she calls me to figure out something I consider so easy. When she texts me it’s always all caps and double spaced. It took me ten minutes to understand something very simple, but to her she accomplished so much. She doesn’t understand that she can download information and books from her library. Instead she still walks miles to the library to check them out.
My mother came to visit, and I showed her Netflix and Hulu. Her world was turned upside down and she couldn’t believe the information she could retrieve online. YouTube is her weakness and a blessing as she always wanted to be a mortician. Even though she is older she is learning the basic knowledge and skills to perform the job. We are all learning something and yet still questioning what was withheld from us. When I decided to attend college, I thought it would be difficult. Now here I am doing homework from my phone and posting on our discussion boards. With three kids in school we are always fighting over the computer to complete our homework, so having this one shift is amazing. I will always love the old school methods but keeping that tradition will not set this generation up for success.
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