On the afternoon of Tuesday 10th December, pupils from Years 6, 9 and 10 were fortunate to receive a visit from Jimmy Wales.
Jimmy is most famous as the co-founder of Wikipedia, and was recently named by TIME magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Many pupils were surprised that a man who has achieved so much began his talk by detailing his failures, but he explained how each of them had helped him to grow as a person and contributed to his later success. Pupils were warned not to tie their ego to a business.
The event ended with a 'Q&A' session with pupils asking Jimmy a range of questions about his business.
Jimmy also discredited the myth that an entrepreneur has a single successful idea from which all their success follows, rather that each successful idea was as a result of gradual improvements made to a series of unsuccessful ideas. He then warned pupils that they must be careful when reading information online and discussed what made superior sources of news and information reliable and trustworthy. This was in particular in comparison with inferior news sources and he warned of the pernicious influence of advertising and clickbait on the information we are bombarded with in the modern world.
As the internet becomes even more central to all of our lives, this will no doubt serve all who attended as a useful reminder about the benefits as well as the potential drawbacks of the information and telecommunications revolution.
Mr Davis (Teacher of History & Politics)