Information Skills
01. Know your mission
02. Fitness for purpose
03. Collecting and shifting information

Using ICT technology well is about more than knowing how to use different software packages. It is also important to learn skills in handling information, whether you are using technology to handle information from others, or to prepare information for other people.

01. Know your mission

It is important to have a clear idea of what question or problem you are dealing with, and to understand what a good answer or solution would look like. This might mean, for example, thinking about the kind of people who will be using the information you create.

• What do they want to know?
• How much or little detail will they want?
• What ICT equipment (if any) are they likely to have, and how might that affect the best way of communicating with them?
• How much time (and maybe how much money), can be spent on the project, and how can you make best use of what is available?

02. Fitness for purpose

It is important to use ICT as a better way of solving the problem you have been set, or as a better way of communicating your answer. The most expensive or elaborate computer package is not necessarily the one that is most fit for your purpose.

Your teacher may ask you to discuss why you chose a particular computer package. You should be able to show you have thought about how best to use the ICT facilities available to you to get the job done.

03. Collecting and sifting information

When it comes to collecting information, you will probably find lots of material to consider, and you will need to think about what to use and what to discard. This is important for information collected from all sources, but the growth of the Internet has made it more important to be critical, both because it is easy to collect a lot of information and because some information on the Internet is of poor quality. Your teacher may ask you why you used or did not use different sources of information. You will need to think about:

• Is your source reliable? For example, a national news organisation is likely to have checked the facts in its stories carefully. A website written by a class of children might be as carefully researched as this, but it might not.
• Is the author presenting only some of the information? Having only some of the facts can be very misleading (whether or not the author has left some things out on purpose).
• Is the source up-to-date? This matters in some areas more than in others. For example, you can probably use a very old recipe, but an old book on computing or an old train timetable may be misleading.
• Is the author trying mainly to inform, or to do something else (such as persuade or entertain)? For example, advertisements for products can contain very useful information, but it is important to remember that they are aimed at selling something. They may not say much about any disadvantages of the product.
• Is the material from this information source consistent with what you've been able to find out elsewhere? If not, think about the reasons for this. Should this source be discarded as unreliable, out-of-date or misleading, or have you found that there are different opinions on the subject you are investigating?

Fact or opinion?
A fact is something that is definitely true. An opinion is someone's view on a subject. When you are collecting information, decide whether you are reading a fact or an opinion so that you don't treat one point of view as if it were a truth everyone agrees about. Unfortunately things are not always clear-cut, as authors sometimes write about strongly-held opinions as if they were facts. Sometimes people don't agree about what would prove something to be a fact. On some subjects it is possible to find authors who completely disagree about what the 'facts' are, or about what the facts mean. Some opinions are completely to do with a personal point of view - there may be no way at all of testing these opinions so that everyone would agree they were wrong or right.

When you are presenting the information you have found, be careful to say whether you think something is a fact or an opinion. When presenting opinions you have collected, say whose opinions they are. Think carefully about the right way to present opinions, because different ways of doing this can give very different results. You should think about the purpose of your work (are you trying to persuade, or present a balanced view?), and your audience.

Copying
When you are collecting information, you may want to print out web pages, or save them for offline use, or copy and paste interesting material into a file of notes. But when you make your report:

• You should not pretend that someone else's work is your own, or reproduce it without their permission.
• If you quote from a web site in your work, you should make it clear where the quote came from.