Information
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.
