Winter 2001/2002.
Page last updated 9 Jan 2002.
Instructor: Gio Wiederhold, CSD, Stanford.
3 units of credit. Enrollment limited to 16 students, freshmen have
priority.
Thursdays 4:00 to 5:00pm and
Fridays 1:15-3:15pm, in Gates 459.
This room is in
the Computer Science department, close to equipment and stuff. See
Map to locate Gates Info Sciences, in the circle.
There is a tentative topic Schedule, with some Notes, initialized from prior years, for each meeting.
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/ .
Information from prior years is available as
2001 description;
2000 description;
1998 description.
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. Some points related to current perceptions are made in the slides on Web Growth
A relevant report is
Instructor: Prof. Gio Wiederhold,
Computer Science, Gates 436,
email to: gio@cs.stanford.edu.
Secretary: Marianne Siroker, Gates 435, 725-8363.
For appointments please
email to: siroker@cs.stanford.edu.
To contact other students and see what the projects are
you can use the classlist (anonymized) during the course.
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.
Thursdays will be used for presentations by participants.
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. Students 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.
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.
There are a number of optional topics that may be selected if interest warrants:
Technologies and services that are relevant include
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.
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
First chapter
List of all
Chapters.
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