The new provider of information: Wikipedia

Wikipedia is known all over the world. The website has been set up by Jimmy Wales. Its main goal is to provide free information to people over the world. The only thing needed is internet of course.

“Wikipedia does not give the truth. It gives objective information about a subject.” This is said by Jimmy Wales. The information is provided by volunteers and can be changed by others. The information is being controlled regurlarly on its reliability, so no subjective information can be found on the website. This makes the data fairly correct.

Although the information is being checked, there are still people who doubt the reliability of Wikipedia. This is because the website is controlled by volunteers, no experts. The articles can be changed by others, which gives less security. The danger of using Wikipedia is that also false information is leaked on the internet.

A big advantage of Wikipedia is that people have free excess to knowledge. Lots of data is hidden by important institutions such as the government. It gives people more freedom to be given information. The danger of this is that also secret data of a country can be made public, which might have negative consequences for its population.

Personally I think that there are more advantages than disadvantages. The amount of information provided is gigantic. Besides, using the internet makes it a lot easier and faster to find answers. This is because books are not necessary anymore. Instead of flipping through the pages, the computer does the searching for you. This saves a lot of time and effort. Even though Wikipedia is not always thrustworthy, it has many advantages and worth using.

Interactive Oral Activity nr.1

Rationale

Our first Interactive Oral Activity was planned on the 15^th of February. Based on the subject Media & Culture, we chose to talk about the invasion of privacy of celebrities.

Our main problem during preparation was the type of form. Eventually we decided to do an interview, with some elements of a talk show. Instead of having a conversation between two people, we made up three people: two being interviewed and one interviewer. This caused some problems in the amount of text and role division. It has been a good choice though, because now we showed two sides of the issue: the experiences of a celebrity and the experiences of a journalist. We divided the amount of text evenly by dividing the role of the interviewer.

Sabine and I have worked together before, so this was no problem at all. This has been our first presentation together though. To be more comfortable, we kept the written text with us during the presentation. Unfortunately this also caused reading out pieces of text and ended up to be our main point of criticism. Personally, I was bothered by the fact I could hear myself making mistakes while the content of the text was formed quite well.

I think the form of an interview suited us and our division of roles worked out pretty good. We doubted if it would get confusing, but it did not. I’m also satisfied with the content of our interview. Our collaboration worked out fine, but I didn’t expect problems because we’ve done projects together before.

We’re both not fond of standing in front of the class, so taking that in consideration the performance was okay. Next time we could try to use keywords, instead of the whole text.