I must
admit, when signing up for this course I wasn’t entirely sure what it would
entail. I had a vague idea, but the overall theme of the course was not
entirely clear to me. I actually thought (and perhaps this is true, I can’t be
sure as of yet) that a big part of this course would be discussing intellectual
property; The Field of Information Policy: Fundamental Concepts does bring up
intellectual property briefly so I’m going to assume at this point that the
subject will come up again. However, that is not what this blog entry is about.
Back to the topic at hand: what the course is going to be generally/primarily
about. After reading The Field of Information Policy, I have a much better
understanding of what I will be learning. It was a general overview of the
definition of information policy and it’s evolution over the years. It seems
that what we know about information policy is…not much. From what I read from the
provided articles, it is a subject only recently broached and constantly being
studied, thought over, and the definition not quite pinpointed. But I think
that’s what will make this class so interesting; there will be a lot to
discuss, and a lot of things to form an opinion on after what I hope will be a
healthy, constructive debate through our online course forums in the blogs that
we are to keep each week. Defining Information Policy by Sandra Braman made this
point a little more clear—she even points out that this was not a heavily
discussed or researched topic until the 20th century. And I’m going
to take a guess that this is partly because of the information boom that
occurred in the latter half of the century and only continues to grow to this
day. The Internet has made information policy difficult I’m sure; information is
near constantly being put onto the Internet, and how is it to be regulated?
Should it be regulated? I do hope this is something we discuss in depth in this
course. It is a topic that has come up briefly in other courses but was not
something I had to form a solid opinion about, and I look forward to
researching the topic more, if that is the case for the course studies.
