Week 10 - Information Management

Lecture 09/05/08

As we all know, information management is important when we are overloaded with documents and assignments. It is therefore important for university students to keep everything orderly and ensure that they will not lose any key information.

Ways in which to keep your desktop orderly is to:

• First create main files for you units. This first step helps you to distinguish where your information needs to go.


• Secondly create sub files within the main files. These sub files could have unit assignment names where you will organise your assignment information and documents.

After doing just these two steps, your desktop will already begin to look more organised and you will now know where your essential unit information is and makes it easier to locate when you need it in a hurry.

Then once you have done this two steps with your unit essentials, try it with other documents, photos and music files and see the difference of an organised computer from when it was not.

Tutorial


Task 1: Organising favourites




Task 2: Negroponte's being digital


The ideas in Negroponte's bits and atoms was interesting. In finding out what bits and atoms were and example of each of them, proved to be quite informative. Even upon finding out that the information on the webpage was published 13 years ago, it still proves to be quite relevant, due to the face that not much has changed in the way that bits and atoms are still the same and have not changed one bit.

Atoms are newspapers, magazines and books.

Pros:

• Exists in space - we can see it
• Easy to protect
• Difficult to change
• Difficult to copy

Cons:

• Bulky
• Costly
• Difficult to edit
• Difficult to distribute

Bits include all types of electronic content.

Pros:

• Very flexible - easy to move, change and edit
• Very cheap
• Easy to mass produce

Cons:

• No privacy - content is easy to copy
• Easy to edit

Reading summary

Jamie MacKenzie's online essay





The thing about the Internet is that it is everywhere. This is now also including schools (whether it be primary or high school) around the world. However there is no proof that having the Internet in schools is assisting in learning. This is because when using the Internet, children in school are not using them for educational purposes, which identifies the problem to begin with. It is not helping children in schools to read or write. It is not helping them learn mathematics or improving problem solving skills. The only way that the Internet will assist in helping children learn is when they are using their thinking skills to determine whether the information is credible or not, in which they will have to train their own minds to evaluate the information and choose for themselves whether the information is good or not. To prepare students for the future or wired schools we need to train them in every aspect, so that what they come up with in right and they can distinguish between good and bad information. To do this they will have to learn in the topic as below.