JDMcDsblog

Photo credit; Flickr,  piru22_jp

“What do you want?

“Information

“You won’t get it

This memorable piece of interrogation was part of the opening credits of The Prisoner, cult TV series of the 60s, whose start Patrick McGooghan died last week.
We all want information. We all use IT. We listen to CDs and watch the TV and DVDs. We send and receive inumerable bits of information each and every day. Wev text and e-mail obsessively. But what is information?

Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, in The Mathematical Theory of Communication discuss the idea of communication and information. Information, for them, is any message,  measured in bits and transmitted from one source and received by another. Between transmission and reception there can be noise, things added to a signal that were not intended-sound, static, distortions of image or, indeed errors in tranmission. I was struck by their point that information is not to be confused with meaning. Meaning implies some underlying structure to the information, perhaps a pattern, or a trend, a set of rules. Meaning may require the information to be analysed, compared, decoded or deconstructed. Units of information need to edited and filtered, and background noise eliminated. It is the teacher’s job to lead a pupil or a class into making meaningful sense of information.

They also stress a very significant concept; that the information content of a message is related to its suprise value, in other words, if the recipient already knows most of what is being said/texted/e-mailed, then the information content is slight. If the message contains information new to the recipient then there is a much greater surprise element. In lofty terms, that surprise may represent an epiphany or moment of revelation when an idea takes root in a mind, and the point is  grasped

Surely good teaching should examine this concept of surprise; a lesson where no new information was imparted would be redundant, or at any rate stale, but equally one where there was information overload could be overwhelming. Effective teaching should involve timing the release of information; enough to challenge, excite and inspire, while allowing time for consolidation, revision and reflection.

Claude Lévi-Strauss 

Photo credit: sagabardon (Flickr)

28th November sees the 100th birthday of one of the 20th century’s most influential anthropologists, Claude Levi Strauss. An ethnologist who studied Brazilian tribes in the 1930s , he wrote a series of papers and books, among them“Tristes Tropiques” and “Le Pensee Sauvage”. Central to his writing is an emphasis on relationships and the primacy of classification and binary opposition in effecting relationships. Levi Strauss was one of the main proponents of structuralism, an approach to anthropology and sociology radically different from that of the British functionalist school. Stucturalism became an article of faith in many universities in the 70s and 80s, in subjects as diverse as English Literatature and Archaeology. At best, one could regard structuralism as an important analytical tool, a means of describing and interpreting deep structures within a system. Leonard Bernstein attempts a kind of structural analysis of key works of music in his seminal book, “The Unanswered Question”, a reproduction of six talks he gave at Harvard. Structuralism dominated archaeology, notably through the discourses of the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), where the relationships of artefacts and monuments, comparative ethnology and human landscape gave ample scope for intellectual conjectire. However, many articles written by structuralist are otiose and verbose. They confuse and confound. Language is contorted and inflated by stock, barren phrases and hideous jargon. Nouns are hijacked for verbs; clauses are spliced and sampled and edited like a late Beatles tape. Perhaps they are played backwards.  In short, many structuralist texts are indecipherable. They have no structure but their own weight. For some, Structuralism has become another “-ism”, a by word for pseudo intellectual postering and pretentiousness, and , along with other movements,  it has been deliciously sent up by the remarkable “Post Modern essay generator” website.To quote,

Each and every time you visit the site it will prepare for you a syntactically correct and entirely unique paper written in the style of a postmodernist intellectual… for example, a 3000 word paper entitled ‘Narratives of Stasis: The deconstructive paradigm of expression and capitalist nihilism’.

See here for further examples of this kind of marvellously plausable litertaure, the first of which was submitted and printed in a reputable academic journal. No doubt peer reviewed.

I am not sure Levi Strauss would approve…