If I'd wanted schoolin', I woulda gone to school. Oh, wait...

[active_apathy]

And so ends another day of learnifying. Or, rather, another day of icebreaking exercises and autobiographical soliloquies from the teaching staff.

But first, an observation. Today happened to fall between the 13th and 15th of February. Yey. This is the first one in four years for which I've been all by my lonesome, and, well, it came and went like a perfectly normal day. This makes me happy, since it seems to mean that a certain upsetting individual is no longer as upsetting.

And now, on to the day's events.

The learning today consisted of two things:

• The definitions of 'data', 'information' and 'knowledge' are all important, but are hopelessly circular and can get to be thorougly existential. And, well, no-one else can tell the difference anyway.
• Modern libraries are full of electrical things. Electrical things can electrofry you. Getting electrofried is bad. Don't get electrofried.

Also, we have a little training library set up in one of the IT faculty's teaching rooms. It has a smallish collection... which looks fairly big, when compared with the campus library. The campus library is squishytiny; while it's physically bigger than my high school's library, its collection is smaller (!). A goodly bit of its space is devoted to computers, two-thirds of which I can't use.

And I should probably buy a ruler for my cataloguing classes. Problem is, in my experience there's two kinds of rulers - ones that go bendy, and ones that break. Plastic and wooden ones break. Steel ones go bendy. Very bendy. 90° bendy. 90° in two different places bendy. I don't even know how it could've happened bendy.

My rulers don't have distances marked. They have a kind of ruler bodycount.

Comments

[mrpyro.livejournal.com]

The definitions of 'data', 'information' and 'knowledge' are all important, but are hopelessly circular and can get to be thorougly existential. And, well, no-one else can tell the difference anyway.

Now I'm trying to remember the differences between the three. I can remember that data is just raw facts without any interpretation (points on a graph, so to speak), and knowledge is interpreting the data so that you actually know what it means, but I can't remember where information falls.

I hear being electrofried hurts. I'd avoid it.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Data is raw fact.
Information is data that's been organised or sorted in some way, and is relevant for whatever's being done.
Knowledge is applied and evaluated information.

And then it gets a bit tricky, because those definitions are in no way absolute. One person's knowledge becomes another's data and that makes things messy.

[mrpyro.livejournal.com]

That makes sense. Kind of. It has been taught to me before: it's just been a long time, back when I was knee-high to a grasshopper*.


*It was a quite large grasshopper