This week’s focus has been on research and changing data into information and into knowledge and in some cases taking those seemingly unrelated facts and making some insights. The old adage that states “Knowledge is power”; not data, or information, but knowledge. We live in a world where we have an incredible amount of data (some of it highly dubious) at our fingertips, it’s how we collate, integrate, and apply that information that gives you the knowledge, and hopefully with time …. Wisdom. The Internet is our cultural photographic memory; it stores everything, good and bad. We apply associations by hand with links, the Internet doesn’t self-associate the internet does is not artificial intelligence. So now we all have access to a photographic memory but does all that data make us all equally “powerful” in the “knowledge is power” sense? No! we have to tag, order, sort, and organize that information in some way. Then you have to create connections between pieces of data that maybe other folks don’t see. Now we have the knowledge and hopefully understanding. This has been the focus in grade 10, 11 and 12 science this week.
