- Methods Question (Required)
Many researchers now dismiss quantitative approaches, for a variety of reasons, and in the social sciences qualitative approaches to research have been applied widely. Today research approaches in the Information Studies field vary widely across many research methods.
Select one of your research interests, and answer all of the following questions:
a. Which methodological approaches dominate inquiry in the area of your selected research interest?
b. How does the larger debate about the strengths and weaknesses of different methodological approaches affect the conduct of research in your chosen area?
c. Describe three research designs - one based on a qualitative approach, one on a quantitative or other non-qualitative approach, and one on a mixed methods approach - for addressing a particular research question in your chosen area.
d. Discuss the adequacy and appropriateness of each design.
- Theory Questions (Cjoose 1)
Information services typically function by providing access to the information that people think they need. Yet some of the policies adopted by the organizations offering such services are designed to protect intellectual property rights in ways that seem to restrict access to information rather than to expand it. How can the apparent conflict between the two motivations—on the one hand, to satisfy the needs of information-seekers, and on the other, to protect intellectual
property rights—be resolved by policymakers? What kinds of consideration should be taken into
account in the policy development process?
OR
“What you may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune. ... The new winners—Google YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie—are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred. By stealing away our eyeballs, the blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music and news-gathering industries that created the original content those Web sites ‘aggregate.’ Our culture is essentially cannibalizing its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave.” (Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, quoted in the New York Times, June 29, 2007, at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/books/29book.html).
Indicate whether or not you agree with Keen and discuss the implications of Web 2.0 from the different theoretical perspectives represented in your doctoral seminars.