ABSTRACT
Human communication consists of exchanges of information, of differences in matter-energy. New information technology is ready to be used to create, store, collect, select, transform, send or display information. In particular, disabled people should be able to take advantage of this technology for their education. The functions of storing and collecting are important, but they are better understood in terms of one or two models of communication. Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver's model seems straightforward. It recognises that encoding and decoding occur. It takes into account the problem of interference: 'noise' is a term from electrical engineering, denoting electro-magnetic interference. Information establishes four principal functions: making, sending/receiving, storing and displaying. Making is subdivided into creating, collecting, selecting and transforming. Sending is of course complemented by receiving. James D. Martin points out that information of most types can be converted into one of these forms. Analogue signals can be changed into digital signals and vice versa.
