TOK presentation on rumours/gossip

[Tevaerua]

one of my final tok presentations (we do 2 then choose our best mark, and i want this one to be the good one) is coming up and i wanted to do mine on rumours/gossip but im unsure what my contemporary problem should be; i don't know how to cut "rumours" down, what sort of knowledge issues to look at.
any ideas?

[deissi]

Just so you know, your school is breaking IB rules. You are only allowed to have one final presentation whose grade is sent to the IB.

If you're that lost with your topic, you might want to consider another topic. It's perhaps best to first find a contemporary problem and then, using the problem, identify the topic and knowledge issue involved.

[Vvi]

Then tons of people's schools break IB rules. One group in my school is actually being allowed to have a 3rd shot at their presentation (since both of theirs so far have been ****).

Anyways, I suppose you could talk about gossip within a cultural context and the differences between Western and Eastern cultures with regard to the acceptability of gossiping about people. Or about the obssession with celebrities, and how taboids report on their every move and start rumours about them. The knowledge issue would be "To what extent are public figures entitled to privacy?" or something like that. What rights do people have to secrecy, if any, when they choose careers that make them famous?

Edited March 17, 2009 by Vvi

[~Lc~]

ya language is definitely a big issue you can discuss in a topic like this. I'm sure there was something in the Alchin book about how people reaccount stories they hear in their own accounts. You could argue it is affected by biases and their paradigms of certain events etc.

[greaterthaninfinity]

I think another neat knowledge issue would be political slandering. During the heat of the American elections, this was such an issue with Obama and McCain supporters slamming Obama and McCain back and forth.

[LinuxBeta]

[quote name='deissi' post='40673' date='Mar 17 2009, 12:06 PM']Just so you know, your school is breaking IB rules. You are only allowed to have one final presentation whose grade is sent to the IB.[/quote]


Are you sure about this? After doing bad on my TOK presentation, I looked through the TOK syllabus, and found that it is not against the rules to do multiple presentations. It said something to the effect of "if more than one presentation is done, the highest mark should be sent in". I would look for it again, but it didn't come up on my first google search, so I gave up I'm pretty sure that it's allowed, unless I mis-read/took the sentence out of context (it's always possible I guess).

[Vvi]

[quote name='LinuxBeta' post='41049' date='Mar 20 2009, 05:52 AM']Are you sure about this? After doing bad on my TOK presentation, I looked through the TOK syllabus, and found that it is not against the rules to do multiple presentations. It said something to the effect of "if more than one presentation is done, the highest mark should be sent in". I would look for it again, but it didn't come up on my first google search, so I gave up I'm pretty sure that it's allowed, unless I mis-read/took the sentence out of context (it's always possible I guess).[/quote]

I read the same thing, you're not imagining it. We do pratcice presentations throughout the year but the teacher doesn't grade as harshly at the beginning as she does for the final ones, so she doesn't send in the grades from the beginning, even if it was your best.