Data is everywhere. Data are the little bits and facts we collect and assimilate to create information which we use to create knowledge and actionable decisions. Humankind has been collecting data since its beginning and using it to survive and thrive in an ever-changing world. The rate of data creation and the formation of information has increased with every era as technology has played a greater and greater role in our lives. This has never been truer than it is now, with smart phones, fitness trackers, IoT sensors, real-time analytics, and continuous news feeds. IBM estimates 90% of all the data in the world has been created in the past two years at a rate of 2.5 quintillion bytes, or exabytes, of data per day! To put that in perspective, that is the equivalent of 2,500,000 one-terabyte hard drives like the external drives so many of us carry around.
With so much data bombarding us it is almost impossible to make sense of it, so we rely on various news sources and algorithm driven applications to distill what we need to know.
We receive information on government, politics, economics, investing, health and societal trends. We tend to select information sources confirm our worldview and unfortunately, we may consume the biases, opinions, agendas, and fallacies of these sources without realizing it. In some cases this may not be an issue but if we are misinformed, we can make poor choices that could affect our health, our finances, our families, and our communities. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight points out that over 80 percent of American adults spend at time with the news each day but only one-third of US adults are able to interpret a graph and solve a basic percentage comparison problem on the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. For this reason, it is incumbent upon us to ensure that we are data literate.
But what is data literacy and how do we achieve it? With the explosion of Big Data there has been a proliferation of data science and information science degrees and courses but there is no real consensus of or framework for this training like there is for an engineer or a physician. In the white paper “Strategies and Best Practices for Data Literacy Education”, Ridsdale et al. define data literacy as the ability to collect, manage, evaluate, and apply data in a critical manner. They go on to propose that the necessary skills should be part of an undergraduate core curriculum while others are of the opinion that it should begin in Kindergarten. How about those who are out of college? How do they become more data literate to be better citizens and better decision makers? Join me as I explore reasons, methods, and tools to improve data literacy.