Session: Winter I, 2009
Course Schedule: Thursdays, 8:00 -11:00 am
Location: IKBLC 260
Course Wiki: http://wiki.elearning.ubc.ca/InfoPolicy561
Instructor’s office location: IKBLC 483
Office phone: 604-822-1574
Office hours: By appointment
E-mail address: lnathan@interchange.ubc.ca
Welcome! Thank you for participating in this course. The more you are able and willing to contribute to this class, the better the experience will be for all of us.
I urge you to contact me with your questions, concerns, and suggestions concerning the course. This can be done over email, or even better, in person.
Course Goal:
Over the past decade, governments throughout the world have developed policy, legislation, and regulation necessary to re-build their national information infrastructures as technological, social, economic, and political change have transformed the idea of the value and position of information in society. Much of what they have done has been in response to challenges posed by global trade agreements such as NAFTA, the WTO, and GATS. The goal of this course is to provide students with the expertise needed to locate, interpret, evaluate, and create policy relating to information and communication issues, particularly as they emerge in an era of telecommunications deregulation, globalization, and high paced technological innovation.
Course Objectives:
Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:
- Understand and describe public policy
- Describe the relationship between policy and information
- Describe the purpose of information policy
- Explain the political, social, economic, and technological changes underlying information legislation and regulation.
- Explain how information policy pertains to LIS, locally, nationally and internationally
- Demonstrate familiarity with current Canadian information policy issues
- Describe and compare recent and current information policy initiatives in other countries
- Create an information policy document in response to a policy issue such as intellectual freedom, freedom of information, the economics of information access and distribution, copyright, privacy, library usage policies, media democracy, net neutrality, etc.
Course Topics:
- Origins and development of information policy as a distinct discipline and current information policy issues
- Public policy, the political economy of communication and information, and current issues related to copyright, privacy, intellectual freedom, and universal access
- Government and institutional policies that affect information transfer
Format of the Course:
Class sessions will be a combination of lectures, discussions, guest speakers and in-class exercises.
Course Discussion List:
Please be sure to sign-up for the class internet discussion list. From whatever email account you wish to use, send the following [leave the Subject line blank]:
address-- To: majordomo@interchange.ubc.ca
message-- subscribe l-561
end
This is the mechanism that I will use to make announcements to you outside class. You are also welcome to post comments/questions to the list if relevant to other students.