CS99I Freshman Seminar:
Business on the Information Highways

Winter 2000/2001.
Page last updated 18 January 2001.
Instructor: Gio Wiederhold, CSD, Stanford.

3 units of credit. Enrollment limited to 16 students, freshmen have priority.
No senior students should attend.

Information from CS99I 2000 is incomplete.
A result from 1998 is Web growth analysis

Meeting times and location:

Tuesdays 4:30 to 5:30pm in Gates B08 in the basement (changed to accomodate a majority of students) and Fridays 1:15-3:15 (changed) in Gates 159 on the first floor. These rooms are in the Computer Science department, closer to equipment and stuff.
Map to locate Gates Info Sciences B08, in the circle.

There is a tentative topic Schedule, with some Notes for each meeting.

Course definition

This page is http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/gio/CS99I/description.html and can also be located via http://www-db.stanford.edu/people/gio.html or simply http://CS99I.stanford.edu/ .
1998 description

Traveling the Information Highways:
Maps, Encounters, and Directions.

Objective

Our seminar is intended to help us all understand what is happening in the emerging information highways and how to assess their benefits. There is no way that we can predict the future, but we can try to understand the forces and the constraints in several dimensions.

We will focus on the use of the Internet for commercial, educational, and scientific objectives. We will present enough of the technology for students to have a sense of what is possible, what potential pitfalls exist along the way, and where things are likely to go in the future.

A relevant report is

    Wiederhold, Gio: Trends for the Information Technology Industry; report prepared for MITI under sponsorship of the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), San Francisco CA 94104, April 1999.

Instructor: Prof. Gio Wiederhold, Computer Science, Gates 433, email to: gio@cs.stanford.edu.
Secretary: Marianne Siroker, Gates 436, 725-8363.
For appointments please email to: siroker@cs.stanford.edu.
To contact other students you can use the classlist.


A useful complementary course may be CS1I, The Internet, taught in this winter quarter by Neal Sample (T 2:45-4:00, in an adjoining room, B12).

Meeting format:

We will spend the initial half of each Friday session presenting a topic of concern to the Internet, and the remainder of the time discussing its import and potential. Following the open tradition of the Internet we publish the results of the course on the World-wide-web, so that the material can be shared beyond the participants of the class. A description of this Web-book is given in a Introductory Chapter. A list of all chapters given is found there on List of Chapters.

The work will consist of essays on certain aspects of Internet activity. You should decide in a topic before the end of January. In general, mailing me a paragraph or so about your topic and the issue within it plan you to address, will suffice. If you are unsure, please make an appointment through my secretary, Marianne <Siroker@cs.stanford.edu>. You will typically get a suitable time within a few days. (My work schedule is irregular, so that having office hours does not work well for me). A tentative topic schedule is available.

Detailed Course Description

We will use the first week to present the technology at a conceptual level, largely by comparing the Internet (draft on-line) with alternate means of communication, as the telephone, electronic mail, fax, and books. Much of the remainder of the course will focus on application topics.

This is NOT a course in Net-surfing. A prerequisite for this course is having some facility in using computers and exploring the world-wide web, as presented in CS1I. We know that most students are better at all kinds of surfing than the faculty will ever be. The discussions will explore the opportunities presented and limited by the Internet, rather than the mechanisms of how to access its contents.

Projecting the current rate of advances into future (not yet on-line) periods, say, when our current freshman class will graduate, is a mojor challenge. We are just on the cusp of moving from a paper-based world to a world where electronic communication supersedes much of the technology developed since Gutenberg.

In time, they will be active contributors in this world. Since we cannot predict the shape, and the rate of its arrival, it is easy to teach solely what we know and have experienced. But planning for a future, while ignoring these changes, is a poor strategy.

Glossary and References

To help in reading this material, specifically if chapters are accessed randomly, we will maintain a glossary. Any word that is usee, and not understood by a participant should be entered. That requires sending an email message to to: gio@cs.stanford.edu with the term, and any defintion you have found or made up.

We will also build up a list of references during the course. As the references are read course participants will append their reviews to the entries.

All the work in this course will create web pages, using the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). We have placed a brief introduction to HTML with the other documents. We will want to use a consistent format as well, that is described in the introductory chapter.


Fin

First chapter
List of all Chapters.


Hit's since 12 Jan 2000: