[MUSIC] Hi everyone, in this lesson we're going to have a look at how different kinds of information are categorized. And what this means for you in your studies at university. Today we have access to more information than ever before. According to the Swedish communication giant Ericsson, by the year 2020, 6.1 billion people will have a smartphone. This kind of access to information is unprecedented. So with this ease of access to information, why do we still need universities? So firstly, let's look at the difference between information and knowledge. Information includes facts, details, descriptions, or a pre-existing analysis of a situational subject. Knowledge, on the other hand, is a person's understanding of the situation or subject. What is important to note here is that an increase in information does not necessarily mean an increase in knowledge. We have access to more information than ever due to technological advances, but this does not necessarily make us more knowledgeable. To build our knowledge, we need to move beyond merely accessing information. We need to be able to make informed and critical choices when selecting, managing, and interpreting information. According to Rheingold, making these choices involves literacies such as focusing your attention, critically evaluating information, participating in digital networks, and engaging in effective collaboration. Using these literacies at university will help you to develop your knowledge about your particular field under the guidance of your lecturers and also your peers. So how do we access, select, manage, and interpret information? We'll cover all of these skills in this course. In this lesson, we'll focus on understanding the categories of different kinds of information that you'll encounter at university. In the next lesson, we'll give a brief introduction to the type of information specific to different disciplines. So as we know, there's a wealth of information available to us, however, not all of it is academic. This doesn't mean that we can't use it at university. All this means is that it's not the product of certain academic processes, such as experimentation or peer review. Lavoie et al's distinction between the cultural record and the scholarly record can help us to understand the differences between various types of information. But what do we actually mean by the cultural record and the scholarly record? The cultural record includes all of the text that we come in contact with on a daily basis, including social media. These texst are generally written by anyone for anyone. They can be aimed at anyone from general public to more private groups such as family and friends. The scholarly record, on the other hand, has been defined as the curated account of past scholarly endeavor. Curated refers to academic validation processes such as peer review and publication. Scholarly sources are typically written by experts and aimed at fellow experts or scholars in the field. The types of texts you might find in the cultural record cover everything from your Facebook status to Tolstoy's War and Peace. That is, correspondence, popular publications, works of art, and so on. The types of texts you might find in the scholarly record, what we might call academic texts, include textbooks, edited non-fiction books, journal articles, state of the art articles, research reports, theses, and conference proceedings. One thing to note, too, is that often the line that defines what belongs to the cultural record and the scholarly record is, as Lavoie et al suggest, fluid, depending on whose perspective you take and which field you're in. Distinguishing between what counts as part of the cultural or scholarly record is different depending on your field and what your purpose for using the information is. When you select information to use in your assignments, you need to be able to recognize whether the sources are cultural or scholarly. You may use all of these sources, however, they will serve different purposes in different fields. Deciding what counts as an acceptable source of information depends on your field, and we will look at this in more detail in the next lesson. [MUSIC]
