What is Information?

Information comes to us through our senses and helps us gain knowledge.  

To gain knowledge, you have to find the information first.  There are two kinds of information.  

Live Information -- To find this kind of information, your brain helps you exclude the information you don't want from all the information swirling around you.  You can help your brain by learning how you learn. Learning to investigate, match, classify, categorize, evaluate, generalize, apply, and reflect using information are important ways to help you be more aware of your surroundings.

Recorded Information -- To find this kind of information, your brain helps you investigate, categorize, sort, select, and organize. You can help your brain with this kind of information by learning search strategies, alphabetical and numerical order, resources and how to evaluate recorded information.  You can also apply the strategies for learning how to learn to using recorded information.

Live information is everywhere around you at every moment. Finding information in the real world is a process of excluding what you don't want.  That is what your brain does for you.  It helps you focus on what you want to know and excludes what you don't want.  

Everything around you is included in live information: the way the sky looks right now, the call your friends just shouted, what your mom is doing -- this is all live information.  When a time, or event has passed, it will never be repeated again in exactly the same way again. Your memory is your only link to this information, unless you record it somehow.

Recorded information.  This is information that you can find somewhere in a book, a library, a website, a video, a newspaper, a database, a cd.  This material is more permanent and is the same each time you see it unless someone changes it in the meantime.  The thing about recorded information is that once it is recorded it needs to be stored somewhere so that we can find it to use it again and learn from it.