Information handling

What is it?

Exponentially increasing amounts of digital data and content are becoming increasingly difficult to store, manage and use. This has led to the development of new ways of handling, searching, analysing and presenting data.

What technologies are involved?

There are a number of technologies and approaches involved; some are fairly self-contained, whereas others involve complex, interrelated changes to the way systems work. Some key areas include: search becoming more intelligent, customisable and context aware; better knowledge management through improved document management, storage and retrieval systems, and the ability to index and search unstructured data; better data analysis through data mining, business intelligence, and pattern matching; using network effects to harness the power of people through user ratings, social network analysis and other collective intelligence techniques; giving meaning (semantics)  to data so that machines can share, interpret and make use of information on our behalf; and new ways of presenting data in more intuitive ways such as through data visualisation.

Why is it important to education?

For education these developments are interesting in two ways. Firstly, they can enable or improve a range of educational business processes underpinned by effective use of data. Currently, although large quantities of data are collected, it is often under exploited. These developments could help with areas such as assessment for learning, ‘just in time’ testing, recording/tracking progress, identifying areas of weakness and delivering more tailored, personalised learning.   

Secondly, for learners they can improve the ability to find the right information among the vast quantities of content available and offer opportunities to analyse and interpret data in new ways. Visualisation, for example, can allow learners to explore new connections and interpretations of data and present findings in compelling ways.

Where is it going?

These trends will continue to be important as the amount of digital content grows and the need to make effective use of data increases. Interoperability between systems should be eased by the use of standards and adoption of approaches such as the Systems Interoperability Framework (SIF). Harnessing the ‘power of the crowd’ to add meaning to content and undertake tasks not suited to computers is likely to increase. The semantic web has been put forward as one possible solution to making the information on the internet useful to computers. This uses ontologies and schemas to separate content from its presentation and gives it a structure that enables information on the web to be retrieved, interpreted and shared by computers. However, many believe the requirements of the semantic web are too onerous, too rigid and too complex to be achievable.