Introduction to the Course

            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 20^th 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.