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Course Syllabus
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Part One
wherein we look at two fundamental problems of information technology, give information technology a historical context, find out what an operating system is, learn some UNIX commands and how to use the Pico editor, begin programming with Perl, review the rise of the World Wide Web from ARPANET to The Semantic Web, learn some details about DNS the domain name service and use Whois to find out who is surfing Terry's web site, and then, finally, we get to look at the World Wide Web and think about it as a sort of Tower of Babel, or World Brain, or maybe a Semantic Web, and how there is hypertext, but it was invented long before the Web came along, and then there are a lot of funny acronyms like XML and stuff, and that is sort of all of it, except for a lot of other stuff that sort of fits in between all this stuff.
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Part Two
wherein we look at the construction and meaning of information when patricians (that is, really important people ran things), and then Terry listed a whole bunch of things that happened when just ordinary people ran things, and like, they were way different, and then we did a short cameo of this guy named Eugene Garfield who I never heard of, but he sort of invented citation indexing, which really turned out to be important in the Web, although most people don't know anything about him, and then we did a section on Google, which was really interesting because I thought it indexed the whole web, but it doesn't because of a whole lot of reasons, and then finally we get to HTML (like I was waiting forever for this part) and then Terry whips right through a bunch of Javascript, which turns out to be kind of tricky, and then we did lots of web style stuff which was really interesting because it connected art to technology, and as usual there was a lot of other stuff that got stuck into this stuff, so that the whole section felt busy and full of stuff.
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Part Three
wherein we look at storing lots of stuff in a computer and how databases were invented, but the amazing thing was that there are different models of how to do that and we spent some time looking at the Relational model and normal forms and such, which was interesting, but kind of weird and then Terry pointed out how databases are so common and popular - I guess you would say successful - that there were, like, too many of them and everybody got confused, and that's where XML fits in because you can do content management with XML, and then we talked about that Salton guy and I don't know, the whole information retrieval thing seems awfully confused, and I think that Terry asked more questions than he answered, and it really amazed me, like nobody knows what text means, so that computers are always making these dumb mistakes, and then we did that XPath stuff and, like, I didn't even have any idea what that was about, and then Terry showed up that picture of that poor librarian and I guess that she doesn't know what's it about either, so it doesn't surprise me that making money on the Internet is what everybody wants to do but nobody knows how to do it right now and then, finally, Terry starts to talk about social problems and like, wow are there social problems like aiming satellites that hit Mars instead of orbiting Mars and the Supreme Court got involved with pornography and then there's online dating (but you've got to watch out for weirdos) and then there was a lot of discussion stuff, and Terry tried to talk about other stuff, but there was so so much stuff that that stuff got mixed up with this stuff, so generally, there was just a lot of stuff.
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