Week Ten in Accessing Knowledge!

9/05/08

Lecture Overview
This weeks lecture was all about information management and using technology for accessing and organising information. There are two different types of information management. The first one is an atom-based information format. An example of atom-based format is books, papers or reports, and example of a bit-based format which is the second information management format is digital reproductions and electronic content. Both atom-based and bit-based formats come with pros and cons. A few principles apply to organising your bits, such as common file extensions and using the properties tool to create metadata about your documents.

Tutorial Activities

For week ten's tutorial we did not only need to complete our week ten blog, tutorial activites and attend the lecture, but also our group assignment was due.

Activity One

Activity one required us to visit a website (http://www.inette.com/aibtinette/favoritesI.html) and learn all about saving and bookmarking websites that we wished to returned to, that we liked, at a later date.

Activity Two

• For activity two we had to use and put into practice what we had learnt from the online tutorial in activity one.


• We had to create three folders of our choice, and then bookmark at least two websites that fit that category.

Activity Three

• For activity three we had to visit Negroponte's famous archive online site "Being Digital" (http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bdcont.htm)


• We had to read the article "The DNA of Information".

Review of Atom-based and Bit-based information formats:

Atom Based: Books, reports and papers are examples of atom based information format. The pros are that we can see it, we can know where it is, it is easily concealed, easy to protect and difficult to change or copy. The cons are that it is bulky, costly, difficult to edit or distribute and inflexible.

Bit Based: Digital reproductions and electronic content are examples of bit based information format. The pros are that it is very cheap and flexible, easy to edit and easy to mass produce and broadcast. The cons are that privacy could be an issue (easy to copy and steal), authenticity- it is easy to fake or edit information, and unsolicited broadcast such as SPAM could occur.