Week 5

Lecture: In this week we learned about Information Management. Ways we can manage our info is: text, documents, images, web pages, bookmarks, presentations, assignments, citations and references. Information has two formats: Atom based and Bit based. The pros of atom based formats is: it exists in space, we can know were it is, easily concealed, easy to protect, difficult to change and difficult to copy. The cons of atom based formats is: there bulky, costly, difficult to edit, difficult to distribute and inflexible. The pros of bit based formats is: they are very flexible, very cheap, easy to edit and easy to mass produce and broadcast. The cons of bit based formats is: they are easy to copy and steel, easy to fake/alter/edit and is an unsolicited broadcast. There has also been a change in the way goods and services have been presented to us: Internet banking, e-mail etc. There is also been a changing in goods and services: tv/foxtel, music-bought, shopping etc. There are ways for organising our bits and that is with file extensions: .doc, .pdf, .zip, .jpg etc.

Workshop: we learneed how to bookmark websites and create folders of subjects and insert websites into those folders containing info on those subjects.

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Reading: There was some reading by N. Negroponte on "Being Digital" Bits and Atoms. He says that most of the information that we receive is in the form of atoms (newspapers, magazines, books etc), but this is soon changing with the use of the Internet. He goes on to use examples of how both atoms and bits both have their pros and cons. The pros and cons are listed above but he use and example: he was in a meeting and they need a certain cd, Fed ex got it shipped straight away but the cd ended up being held at customs. Negroponte decided to download it from the net and got it straight away, what he is trying to say here is that, they could have got the cd through fed ex and have a hard copy (atom), but could get it quicker as bit form from the net. He also says that sure enough you can get bits faster, the quality of a hard book (atom) is the best. Having a hard copy of some thing does have better quality but come at a price, and that is usually the cost of shipping and handling