As part of our ongoing review of curriculum here (are you listening COA?), we’ve decided to create a ‘big ideas’ course that we believe should be required of all information students. This raises the very interesting problem of identifying just what are those big ideas? If you do what normal folks do when first asked this question, you reach for google. A quick glance (or even a longer scan) of the results might disappoint you, though there are examples for science in general and for computer science but nothing for information science.
A few years back now I gave a keynote at CoLIS (still one of my favorite conferences) that addressed this topic. In it I mentioned three big questions for the field that came up from an earlier discussion with our faculty:
- What is the essential nature of information that might relate diverse endeavors (communicating, maintaining biological life, learning and finding) where the term is employed meaningfully?
- How do we move from an information provision model (storage, retrieval, management etc.) to one where we identify and shape the manner in which information nourishes a culture, an organization or an individual?
- How might we positively influence the cyberinfrastructure as the majority of the world joins us online?
Now questions are not the same as ideas but it would seem to me that if we had big ideas then we’d be answering big questions of this kind. Are we asking big questions now? And what are those big ideas of information that give us a distinctive field? Am interested in your thoughts. Feel free to share.