Week Eleven: Building Knowledge 18/05/07

Lecture
Data is factual and non-judgemental. Information is relational, dimensional, permanent and has meaning. Knowledge is experiential, judgemental and very valuable. Collecting data must be valid and unbiased, quantity is better than quality and must be representable. Information must inform, the data must relate and must be meaningful. Knowledge is the justification of the data and information. Sampled data are like price, shares and exchange rates. Measured data are like weather and census data. Historical information is like almanacs and tables of census data. Records are like budgets and meetings.

Workshop
An online dictionary is very useful and a dictionary website called http://www.dictionary.reference.com/ may have helped some people in this week’s workshop. I looked up the term Data and received “a single piece of information, as a fact, statistic, or code; an item of data.” Information means “Knowledge derived from study, experience, or instruction.” And Knowledge means “The state or fact of knowing.” Understanding relationships will improve to the understanding of patterns then will improve the understanding of the principles.
Organisations collect information from their customers because the information helps them improve the quality of their services for the customers. Five organisations that do this are Telstra, Optus, Centrelink, Synergy and Alinta Gas.

Readings
The website Data, Information and Knowledge by Dr Jim Mullaney is about relationships and questions on building knowledge.
The website Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom by Gene Bellinger, Durval Castro and Anthony Mills is about data, information, knowledge, understanding and wisdom.
The website Information Literacy Tutorial by Thomas W. Eland is about production of knowledge, organisation of knowledge, thesis to search strategies, fundamentals of search engines, referencing resources, citing sources and copyright.

Summary
I used an online dictionary to find out terms of data, information and knowledge. I used Microsoft Words to draw a diagram of the data, information and knowledge. Wrote about the understanding the relationship between data, information and knowledge. I listed five organisations that collect information from people and explain why they do this. I summarised the readings for this week on building our knowledge.