Week 11 - Building Knowledge

Lecture 16/5/08

Today lecture was about the process from data forming into information and then gradually becoming knowledge. The topics that we covered include:

1. The relationship between data, information and knowledge and how the process works between the three of these.
2. The characteristics of data, information and knowledge.
3. The importance of each of these for a person to know.
4. How they work together in a business context and
5. How with the process, understanding and connectedness can extend to wisdom.
   

Tutorial

Five organisations that collect information from their clients and why?

Australian Marine Conservation Society (http://www.amcs.org.au/)

• They collect their clients details because it means that they can send out information to inform people on issues and conservation problems around Australia.

eBay (http://www.ebay.com.au/)

• eBay collects personal details to that they can organise the transferal of money and goods between clients.

Facebook (http://www.facebook.com.au/)

• Facebook is a social site which collects information from clients so that you can meet and talk to other people around that world.

Myspace (http://www.myspace.com/)

• This site is very similar to Facebook except it has more privacy.

Blogger (http://www.blogger.com/)

• This site enables you to make a blog for everyone to see. The information it collects includes email and make up a password so that you can log into and update your blog.

Definitions

Data: is a collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn.

Information: is the result of processing, manipulating and organizing data in a way that adds to the knowledge of the receiver.

Knowledge: is information that is generally known.

Wisdom: is the ability, developed through experience, insight and reflection, to provide truth and provide good judgement.

Understanding the relationship between data, information and knowledge.

Understanding the relationship between data, information and knowledge can be very important to a university student and assist their studies. By understanding that data, once making a connection to other forms of data, becomes information because of connections made between them, it then brings the facts to come together and makes it information. Then once building the connections between data and becoming a collection of information, that collection becomes knowledge due to memorizing it. This means that you can build up your knowledge on a topic you are researching and can be helpful to you because you now no the relationship on how to build your knowledge up and will then help you be able to give much more depth into your topic for assignments and possibly create new knowledge.

Reading Summary

Data, information, knowledge and wisdom

Data = symbols

It only exists within itself and has no more significance, no matter what form it is in.

Information = data that are processed to be useful

Information gives answerer's to who, what, where and when questions and has been given meaning through connection.

Knowledge = application of data and information

Knowledge is an appropriate collection of information. When you have memorized something, you have created knowledge.

Wisdom = evaluated understanding

Wisdom contains data, information and knowledge. It gives us understanding of a topic where there had been no understanding before.