Distance Education in Transition - Master of Distance Education ...

"Information" and "Knowledge" - On the Semantic Transformation of Two Central Terms
nothing new for pedagogy. For example, many terms that most definitely come from the
fields of psychology or sociology have been taken over and found a new home in pedagogy.
We only need to remember the behaviourist terminology which turned up in the context of
programmed instruction, the "autocratic and socially integrative behavioural forms" of
teachers according to Reinhard and Anne-Marie Tausch (1979) and the term "socialisation".
However, these were in each case individual terms which were related to processes of
education or learning from the start; with the digital learning environment we have an
incalculable abundance of alien terms which do not have any such reference of themselves.
Pedagogues and instructional designers are forced to adopt them if they want to use the
potential of the digital learning environment for their purposes. The alien terms are, it is
true, interpreted pedagogically and given new meanings, a procedure which usually takes
place unconsciously or at least semi-consciously, and is hardly ever reflected on.
In this situation of linguistic reorientation and semantic adjustment the particularly
frequent use of the terms "information" and "knowledge" is striking. In the period before
the digitalising of learning neither term played a particular role in pedagogy and didactics3 .
Today, in contrast, they are in current use and can be found in many books, papers and
lectures. We can see through this just how much the pedagogical situation has changed in
a few years.
It is obvious that the term "information" is preferred. It appears much more frequently
in the literature. It is possible that this is supposed to signal open-mindedness to the
dramatic advances made by information and communication technology, to appear
innovative and progressive, or to demonstrate conformity with the zeitgeist. Its increasing
use irritates pedagogues who are sceptical of innovations, because they see in it a "depedagogisation"
and "technological third-party determination" of their own specialist
language.
Information and knowledge are frequently mentioned together. They often stand
together as a terminological pair or are even used as if they were interchangeable. This
leads to terminological fuzziness. In this situation it is necessary to demonstrate precisely
what these two terms actually mean and how they differ from each other in principle
and pedagogical practice. Only on the basis of the criteria that are acquired here can we
decide whether we live at present in an »information society« or in a »knowledge
society«, and whether the complaint by T.S. Eliot quoted at the beginning of this article
refers also to our current consciousness and is therefore justified.
Information
"Information" is derived from the Latin informatio meaning "conception, instruction,
admonition." The corresponding verb informare means "to educate, conceive something,
explain, teach something" (Heinichen, 1947). The use of the borrowed word includes
both the process and the object components. In the analysis of this term we must keep
3 Significantly, these terms are not found in older German pedagogical lexica, e.g. Groothoff & Stallmann
(1968), Rombach (1970) and Wulf (1974) or in more modern pedagogical lexica, e.g. Böhm (1994), Reinhold,
Pollak and Heim (1999). There are no separate articles dedicated to the subject of "knowledge" in more
modern German handbooks on adult education (Nolda, 2001, p. 101).
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