Information

Three views of information

In a model of teaching and learning called information engineering it is necessary to have a clear view of what information actually is.

It is an odd fact that although Shannon’s mathematical theory of information describes how to calculate how much information is contained in a message it doesn’t actually define what information is.

There are various views on the nature of information, which can be summarised under the headings of information-as-process, information-as-knowledge and information-as-thing [1]. 

Each of these classes contain definitions of information that are useful in different contexts.

Information-as-process

With information-as-process, information is identified with the process of becoming informed. This sounds very much like the learning process.  In this case how do we regard the information as it is created by a teacher before it gets anywhere near a student (or vice versa). This information will indeed in the future become part of the the learning process, but this doesn’t happen until the learning process begins.  This would naturally be taken as the point at which the information is presented to the learner.

In the information era there is a lot that can be done to information as it passes back and forth between teachers and learners and it would seem prudent to give information some independent existence outside of the physical learning act. And so, information-as-process does not seem to be fit well with human teaching and learning.

Information-as-knowledge

With information-as-knowledge, information is regarded as equivalent to the knowledge to which it corresponds. In computing science this can be a useful view since there is normally an unambiguous relationship between information exchanged between agents and the way it is stored and processed given identical software and operating systems on the different agents.

However, in the context of human education, this is not such a useful formulation of the concept because we know that presenting the same information to different humans will often, perhaps always, result in differences in the resulting knowledge.  Otherwise, teaching would be a lot easier than it is.

And so information-as-knowledge does not seem suitable as a basis for information engineering.

Information-as-thing

This leaves information-as-thing, independent of process, knowledge and mind.

In other words, information becomes a commodity in the world just like others such as coal, oil, sapphires and rubies. 

Information-as-thing fits very well with the first premise of information engineering:

In electronic form, information can be produced, consumed, moved, copied, searched, tagged, classified, pushed, pulled, re-routed, mashed, broadcast, networked, syndicated, federated, mediated, transformed, destroyed, studied, ignored...

Whilst information-as-thing can provoke hostile reaction in many, it has its place in the literature of logic and philosophy [2].

Buckland provides some examples of the hostility.  Take a quote by Machlup,

The noun ‘information’ has essentially two traditional meanings... Any meanings other than (1) the telling of something or (2) that which is being told are either analogies and metaphors or concoctions resulting from the condoned appropriation of a word that had not been meant by earlier users.

So there.

From Fairthorne,

...information is an attribute of the receiver’s knowledge and interpretation of the signal, not the sender’s, nor some omniscient observer’s, nor of the signal itself.

For the purposes of information engineering it is worth putting up with the scorn because of the usefulness the concept provides.  If, in doing so, there is some adjustment of meaning, so be it. Apart from the usefulness, it is also clear what the adjustment of meaning is, and it is hard to imagine circumstances in teaching and learning where this use of the term will result in any horrible difficulties of a logical kind.

In his article, Buckland also discusses the idea of information as evidence. 


It can also be useful to look on information as an agent for learning.  Information induces knowledge in the mind of the engaged learner.

Using this terminology we can posit that the same information can induce different end results in different people, a situation of which teachers are well-aware.

The word induce in this context fits well with the idea of implicit knowledge, which is a concept useful for discussing the design of teaching materials.  Implicit knowledge will be considered in a future post.

1. Buckland (1991), Information as Thing, Journal of the American Society for Information Science,360.

2. Dretske, F. (1999), Logic and the Flow of Information, CSLI Publications.

Introduction

This blog describes an information engineering approach to online education in the network age.


There are two basic premises.

1. In electronic form, information can be produced, consumed, moved, copied, searched, tagged, classified, pushed, pulled, re-routed, mashed, broadcast, networked, syndicated, federated, mediated, transformed, destroyed, studied, ignored...

2. Knowledge is induced by information.

Taken together, these two statements strongly suggest that a model of teaching and learning should have information at or very near its centre.

This is the starting point of the information engineering approach to online teaching and learning.

The term itself emerged as an obvious label for two major reasons.  

Firstly, it distinguishes the field from the information processing model of teaching and learning which is principally a cognitive model.  In information engineering, both the cognitive and exocognitive aspects of processing information are important features.  There is also a strong emphasis on the idea of knowledge being induced by information.  This shifts the aim of constructing teaching materials as representations of knowledge to materials that can induce knowledge. This induction of knowledge relates to the concept of implicit (or distributed) knowledge.

Secondly, the information-as-thing model is adopted.  That is, information is treated as a commodity that can be engineered much in the same way that a chemical engineer deals with the processing of oil or coal.

Over the past 20 years or so, direct instruction or instructivism has been increasingly overshadowed by teaching methods based on constructivist models of knowledge and learning.  Information engineering offers a more balanced approach between instructivist and constructivist models based on ideas drawn from attention theory.

The term information engineering has been used before principally in the business field relating to how an organisation deals with information.  This overloading should not lead to any confusion.

Information channels

The idea of an information channel sits well with the idea of information-as-thing.  Each information channel transports information in a particular format between two termini.  Information channels are characterised by many features: for example, the form of the information, the transport mechanism, and the security technology.

Cognitive and exocognitive tools

The term cognitve tool has become heavily overloaded in the fields of cognition, teaching and learning, and the extended mind.  To minimise confusion it has proved useful to introduce the idea of exocognitive processing of information using exocognitive tools.

Learning styles

The set of exocognitive tools that a student uses to produce, consume and process information provides a model for learning styles that is more suited to the information age than existing models.

The VLE and PLE

Attempting to second guess the set of tools that will become popular with students in the construction of their PLEs is likely to be a fruitless task.  Hence, it would not be wise to try to build PLEs for students.  Let students develop their own PLEs and then define the relationship between the institutional VLE and the PLE in terms of information channels.  The VLE should aim to provide information channel manifolds that optimise the chances of hitting the range of formats that are compatible with the tools in the PLE.  There are obvious VLE architectures and technologies that are particularly suited for creating these manifolds and for rapidly adding new channels according to the changing needs of students.

Cognitive or competence hole networks

The cognitive hole is a term that has been coined to refer to an aliquot of implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge in this case is a type of distributed knowledge in which the distributed domain is the single mind.  This type of distributed knowledge is a well-defined concept in epistemic logic where the distribution is defined to be over two or more agents.  In this case the agents are different processing units in the same mind.

A cognitive hole represents a cognitive state that can be reached using current knowledge. For example, if a person knows A and B which can be combined to form C then C, before the learning act, is a cognitive hole (implicit knowledge).  If there are sensorimotor aspects to the learning then the cognitive holes can be looked on as competence holes.

A directed graph can be created to represent a teaching and learning workflow, or learning design, in which there is a sequential filling of cognitive holes.

This type of directed graph has been christened a kungkhie.

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All the topics mentioned above will amplified in further posts.