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

"Information" and "Knowledge" - On the Semantic Transformation of Two Central Terms
demographic time bomb (Virilio, 2000, p. 123) and points accordingly to their share in
provoking an apocalyptic end to human civilisation.
Those who want to understand the inflationary use and enormous force of this second
version of the term "information" have to become familiar with those different meanings
which it only acquired in the context of the reception of the American theory of
information, information and communication science and informatics. The English word
("information") was placed alongside the Latin word ("informatio"). In these research
fields information is naturally the central term, which is in fact signalled through the
names of the disciplines. However, its meaning is decisively different from the ones
sketched in here. "Information" here is something that is derived from transmitted data,
signals or signal consequences.
How did it come to this difference in meaning? In information theory the term
"information" is defined purely formally. The basis for this is the mathematical theory of
the transmission of information from Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver
(1978): for them, information becomes a mathematically describable technical term
which deviates considerably from general use because the "sense" and "meaning" of the
information is not important. 4 With its help attempts are made to explore empirically the
quantitative regularities of the transmission of information and to show them in formal
theory. This deals, for example, with the ordering characteristics of the signals, channels
and their capacity, the efficiency of encoding, the calculation of information quantities
or of transmission faults, in other words, with the fundamental conditions of productive
information work, which is understood to be "working out, processing and managing
items of information" (Kuhlen, 1991, p. 334). These circumstances are extremely important
for pedagogues, because learning is primarily a matter of understanding the "meaning"
of information.
The information theory paradigm was taken over by informatics, the science of automatic
knowledge processing. Here it is important above all to enable the above-mentioned
information work technically, in other words, for example, searching, finding, recording,
storing, retrieving, transmitting, converting and arranging items of information. In order
to be able to develop the appropriate technologies, the information was subdivided
empirically into its components or elements. These are referred to as "signals" and "data".
Signals are signs that are given through technical means, sent over a distance and whose
meaning is agreed beforehand by the sender and the addressee. In cybernetics this is an
energy-laden physical process. An attempt is made above all to detect and reconstruct
the formal and technical sequences of this process. The technically skilled interpret a
series of signals, which bring about something definite in defined situations, as modules
for the creation of information. The signals that come from the letters of the text can
take on the character of images through multimedia and simulations, through which a
new tape of encoding of information is created. This consists of a type of "pictorial
4 This research discipline was able, however, to use the help of empirical means to say something about the
"content" of information. it measures the information content with the degree of uncertainty that is caused by
the lack of the information. The value of an item of information is determined by the significance that it has
for the addressee. It is great, if the information is completely unexpected, and low if the content is more or less
known beforehand. In other words, this is simply a formal characterisation of the content of the information.
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