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I haven't been given an account on the Qwiki beta yet, so I haven't actually played with it. However, any time someone tells me I'm "drowning in data" I get rea

I haven't been given an account on the Qwiki beta yet, so I haven't actually played with it. However, any time someone tells me I'm "drowning in data" I get ready for a fight. Quite simply, we're not drowning in data. Data is the best hope we have to save us from the rise of multiple-choice questions at the college level. http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data... I'm all for tools that make data easier to find, tame and publish. Yet, spoken word generated by a computer is an incredibly low bandwidth way to learn anything. Those of you with accounts, what am I missing?

pedalpete 16y ago
I believe you are looking for the difference between information and data. Not worth fighting over. Data is raw material, information is data put into context. I suspect/hope that Qwiki is trying to do the later. We are over our heads in data, but at the same time we are suffocated by what poses as information. I would argue that we need the ability to turn data into information which suits our purposes. I think good examples are 'What's the weather for the next 4 days in the places I'm going to be. ' or products like flighcast which tells you if the airline ticket you are looking at buying is likely going to do up or down in price.
- Gormo 16y ago
  Only the mind itself can process data into information - we apply a relevance filter to our perceptions and link related concepts together. That means that exposure to more data gives us better-trained filters and more, deeper connections between concepts. In other words, we become better at thinking and making judgments when we are exposed to more and more data. To say that "we are over our heads in data" is to see value in only in the the consumption of static, general knowledge, rather than in the ability to synthesize specific and relevant information.

pedalpete 16y ago

I believe you are looking for the difference between information and data. Not worth fighting over. Data is raw material, information is data put into context. I suspect/hope that Qwiki is trying to do the later. We are over our heads in data, but at the same time we are suffocated by what poses as information. I would argue that we need the ability to turn data into information which suits our purposes. I think good examples are 'What's the weather for the next 4 days in the places I'm going to be. ' or products like flighcast which tells you if the airline ticket you are looking at buying is likely going to do up or down in price.

Gormo 16y ago
Only the mind itself can process data into information - we apply a relevance filter to our perceptions and link related concepts together. That means that exposure to more data gives us better-trained filters and more, deeper connections between concepts. In other words, we become better at thinking and making judgments when we are exposed to more and more data. To say that "we are over our heads in data" is to see value in only in the the consumption of static, general knowledge, rather than in the ability to synthesize specific and relevant information.