Below is a list/summary of the content of my first DITA session. Before getting into specifics we were told that The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) need fully trained Information professionals who're able to use and implicate the skills learned in order to maximize the potentials and capabilities of the technologies which would be used in our chosen fields, and how through these technologies we'd need to be able to handle the ever increasing data and information being handled within the Information arena (in my case: libraries).
Our lecture today consisted of a brief introduction to the module and some basics w/r/t underpinnings of computers. The lecture gave greater focus to the information aspect and not so much the various technologies being used within the Information arena (was emphasised in class that this is not a computer programming module). Listed below are the main points raised in the lecture, followed by an overview of th tasks carried out in the lab session.
1) Binary Coding: Bits and Bytes
Computers use a distinct code in which to express the digital information they process (www97.intel.com, 2007). The term used is Binary Code. Its called this because it consists of only two symbols, in this case, 0's and 1's (the "bi" in "binary" means two (I'm guessing)). Like an electrical switchboard, 0 represents OFF and 1 represents ON. Each Binary Code, made up of 0's and 1's, is representative of a specific letter (NOTE. Only US alphabet represented by coding).
Quick Definition
Bit: A binary digit, ie. 1/0
The word "Bit" is taken from the first two letters of BInary and the last letter of digiT.
Byte: A sequence of 8 bits
You can also have:
Kilobyte ---- 1024 bytes
Megabyte ---- 1024 Kilobytes
Gigabyte ---- 1024 Megabytes (MacFarlane, 2011)
This link provides the alphabet in binary coding:
So, for example, the letter "a" would be made of 8 bits (8 binary digits), these being 01100001. My first name spelt in binary digits (or ASC11 (The American Standard Code for Information Interchange 2)) would be:
a: 01100001
n: 01101100
d: 01100100
r: 01110010
e: 01100101
w: 01110111
Files and Documents
After discussing the basics of binary coding we moved on to files and documents. The worksheet on Moodle had files defined as: named collections of related digital information. We looked at various file types and names (Jpg, xls, docx, ppt) and how these files are structured, as in common files seen on a Windows computer, ie. mydocs --- student --- DITA --- SESSION 1 --- etc... The advantage of having documents stored in this logical process is to make information retrieval easier and quicker.
Information Consumption
Toward the end of the lecture we looked at the amount of information being consumed by people through internet usage. The figure in 2000 for the amount of information consumption per person on the planet was 250 megabytes each (Lyman et al., 2000). Three years later in 2003 this figure rose to approcimately 800 megabytes each (Lyman et al., 2000). These figures were calculated by ading the total amount bytes used via the internet and then divided by the number of the worlds population. In 2003 this was estimated at five Exabytes (don't ask), which is the equivilent to all the words ever spoken by human beings ( , 2011).
Conclusion
From what was heard at the end of the lecture, I think its fair to say we're being flooded in information, something which reminded me at the time of something Jean Baudrillard once said: "We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning."
References
MacFarlane, A. (2011) Digital Information Technologies and Architectures Introduction (Worksheets)
http://www97.intel.com/en/TheJourneyInside/ExploreTheCurriculum/EC_DigitalInformation/DILesson1/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETsfylK7kzM
Lab Session
1. In the lab sessions we started by creating a file in Wordpad and saving to the hard drive. From here we changed the name of the file.
2. From here we played around with the text in the file (blod, italic, font type) and then saved it, changing the file to "docx."
3. Next we opened the file in a different programme (Wordpad) and viewed the file in its new format. Instead of the coherent text which was visible in Word, you were now presented with a long list of (to my eyes) meaningless characters. Witin those characters though was displayed the original text. From this we saw that without "Word" we couldn't read the document.
4. The next stage was saving the file as an "HTML" document (web page, in this case: weather.html). In doing so we could now view the dicument in a www browser.
5. We then added an image (see expert drawing below) which was representative of the outside weather to accompany the text.
6. From here we set up our blogs.
