Building Knowledge

Lecture Summary

This week's lecture will be based at the topic of building knowledge, which will be subheaded by datum, information and knowledge.

Definitions of the three terms:

Datum is a fact or proposition and it is normally non judgemental, non inferential, transient, has no intrinsic meaning and has no intrinsic value as well. It is important that a data be valid and unbiased and must be quantitative rather than qualitative and must also be representative

An Information is a collection of facts or data that relate to each other, information is also summative, relational, dimensional, permanent, has meaning and uncertain value. It is important for an information to be informative and meaningful.

A knowledge is the sum or range of what has been percieved, discovered or learned. A knowledge can also be inferential, experiental, judgemental, subjective and very valuable. It is important for a knowledge to be clear in its origin and be a justification from the data and information.

Tutorial Summary

The tutorial will be exposing students into the meanings of the words datum, information, knowledge and wisdom and their importance to the students in their further studies. Students would be exposed into a range of definitions to the four terms and then students will record

definitions they feel more comfortable with. Below is a list of selected definitions to the four terms:

Taks 1

Datum is the representation of concepts or other entities, fixed in or on a medium in a form suitable for communication, interpretation, or processing by human beings or by automated systems (Wellisch, 1996). Prof. Elsa Barber

Information is data that has been processed into a form that is meaningful to the recipient (Davis and Olson, 1985). Dr. Hanne Albrachsten

Knowledge is embodied in humans as the capacity to understand, explain and negotiate concepts, actions and intentions. Dr. Hanne Albrachsten

Wisdom is the power of judging rightly and following the soundest course of action, based on knowledge and understanding.

Task 2

Knowing the relationship between data, information, knowledge is critical to university studies and can help one especially in situations where there is a research assignment. Knowing the difference of these four terms results in confident attack to assignments as you know the data that to be used and the resulting information from conclusion of data pertaining to the assignment. Doing this successfully will result in a building of knowledge as an understanding has been built from the relationship between data and information.

Task 3

Transperth normally takes information from its clients mainly to know if they are providing the services that the customers expect form them.

Department of Education would normally ask parents to comment on the way schools are run and taught and if they would like to see some changes put into place to make better.

Police takes information from the public to seek ways that they can coorporate with the public to stop crimes.

Shopping Centres will try to collect information from the public to acquire public's view on the services they offer and by doing this they can better their services based on what is the public's perspective.

Political parties traditionally rely on the public to provide them with the guide to their policies, they collect information to know what are the most important issues with the public on the day.

Reading Summary:

This reading is pertained to the topics of data, information, knowledge and wisdom. According to professor Russell Ackoff human mind is classified into five categories, data which is a symbols, information which is the data that is processed to be useful, knowledge which is the application of data and information to achieve answers and wisdom which is an evaluated understanding. Ackoff indicates that the first four categories relate to the past; they deal with what has been or what is known. Only the fifth category, wisdom, deals with the future because it incorporates vision and design.