Week 11, Data, Information & Knowledge, 16-10-2007

LECTURE

The week 11 lecture was all about data, information and knowledge. Data is a fact or positions, where as information is collection of facts or data that is related. Knowledge is what has happened, been found or learnt. Some of the main points of data stated by Justine is that data is factual, non-judgemental, has intrinsic meaning and value etc. Information has the following, summaries, relational, dimensional, has meaning etc. Characteristics are subjective, experimental, judgemental etc. The main use of data is to collect valid and unbiased data. Information importance is to inform the reader and be meaningful. Knowledge should show clearly the origins and conclusion.

Some of the examples that Justine gave out for data is sampled data (e.g. shares) and measure data (e.g. weather). For information; historical information (e.g. tables of census data) and records (e.g. budgets, minutes). Knowledge examples are the white papers, press releases and marketing strategies. Justine also gave out hints on assignment work. Highlighting keywords, definitions and also knowing what you are looking for will go a long way in working out what information you need. With assignment work, data refers to the researching phase of the assignment, information is the building phase of an assignment and knowledge is the composition phase of the assignment. Justine recommends that this all should be looked at as a helpful tool in doing assignments.

TUTE

For the first task of week 11 we are to use some online dictionaries to find the definitions of the words Data, information and knowledge. I firstly went to the website http://www.dictionary.com and found the following definitions:
Data


Information


Knowledge


I also used the website The Free Dictionary at http://www.thefreedictionary.com to find the definitions of the same three words- information, data and knowledge.

Data


Information


Knowledge


This is a graphical interpretation


The need for all three plays a major role in university life. As you are a student, these three play as a backbone sort of role in general work in particular assignments. Finding data is a big part as it is the first step. Finding data will enable you to get an understanding of the information. Bringing all that data in and interpreting it will give you the information that you need. When the two are combined knowledge becomes present. It is helpful no matter what a student is using it for.

This sort of information can be needed by:
· Census, which the government needs, find out information about the public
· Supermarkets (Coles, Woolworths), so that they can provide products to customers
· Car companies like Holden, why make a whole bunch of fuel guzzling cars when petrol costs so much?
· Building businesses like Dale Alcock, so that he can find out how many people that he needs to employ to keep up with the boom
· Local government, so that they can have a better understanding of what their needs and wants are, is there a need for more roads? etc



READINGS


Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom – The heading of this reading is what the reading is pretty much about. This pretty much gives information about each one. I have noticed that some of the graphs were used in the lecture.

Information Literacy – this provides help with the above again. In addition this provides the user quizzes to test the user about what they have learnt. There are seven quizzes. This website was designed to help students from Spring Hill College.

Data, Information & Knowledge - This is a reading by Jim Mullaney and is in PDF format not a website like the others. This also gives definitions of data, information and knowledge. In this reading, it talks about the relationship between them and also questions that are related to data, information and knowledge.