Saturday 6 October 2012

My Information Universe


The examples cited below are in preparation for Thing 5. They discuss the different information resources I used and the underlying decisions which informed my choices when making particular searches in the past. 

The first instance that comes to mind is when I had to submit an International Economics term paper during my undergraduate studies.  It was a group work and our task was to analyse the development challenges facing Africa, using Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa as case-countries. The course tutor insisted that we built our argument on resources gotten from Government Ministries in each respective country. This made our task herculean, as we found it challenging to verify most of the data we generated. However, we eventually decided to compare the data we got from the ministry websites of each country with World Bank Development Reports for each respective country, as this United Nations agency was common to all our case-countries. Adopting this approach helped us finish our term paper with minimal challenges.

The second instance that comes to mind and one which has proven to be cost effective over the years is what informs my choice of air travel. The past two years saw me do a lot of air traveling. In the beginning, spending so much money on air tickets and airport-to-city commuting took its toll on my wallet, until a colleague advised I used a travel search engine to compare prices before making my decision. This search engine allows customers to compare prices of flights and car rental, it works by posting prices of several travel websites (for any specified route) simultaneously, thereby giving customers the opportunity to select a choice that suits their wallet and time schedule. Sometimes, it even has links to review sites where consumers can rate the travel vendors on particular routes based on their individual travel experiences. So, before you commit to traveling with your favourite airline, you might want to check out travel search engines.


Michael Lewis 

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