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Digital Leadership

Digital Leadership Skills for Students

Evaluating Information

This refers to the ability to locate, evaluate, organise and share information and data, to help with decision making. 

Why will you do need to analyse data and information?

It is often a requirement with many job roles that you will have to analyse and evaluate written and numerical data in a range of contexts such as:

  • decision making
  • evaluating services
  • making presentations writing reports

You will probably use a variety of resources to help you with this, such as:

  • search engines, like Google
  • company and organisation websites
  • wikis and blogs and journal and newspaper articles

You will need to know how to organise the information you find for your own use and also to share with your work colleagues, file sharing tools like One Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox can help with this.

It is not only about organising and presenting data you will also need to be able to judge if the information is trustworthy and relevant as well as distinguish different kinds of information eg academic, professional, personal and political. It is good to have a knowledge of copyright and data protection to know what type of information can be shared. 

Data Skills

These are some of the skills that you may require to effectively analyse, evaluate and share data:

  • Use curation tools such as pinboards, social bookmarking and folder sharing
  • Use copyright alternatives such as creative commons licensing; use appropriate referencing for all digital information sources, if you are going to reuse data and information 
  • Manage, access and use digital data in spreadsheets and other media.
  • Understand how to interpret data relevant to the purpose for which you are using it
  • Ensure personal data is secure and use privacy settings appropriately and have an understanding of data protection
  • Follow appropriate ethical, legal and security guidelines when using data, the company or organisation in which you are working should have policies and guidelines on this 
  • Understand how data is used to construct arguments
  • How to present data a range of digital media – text, graphical, video, animation, audio and multimedia.
  • Presenting data for particular audiences, purposes and effects.
  • Understand how the interpretation of data influences social activity and personal life