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Web 1: Concepts and Skills

Class information

Class will meet for seven weeks (9/11-10/23/06) on Mondays from 6:00-9:00pm.

MacLean Center 112 South Michigan Avenue, Room 714

Instructor

Jason Kunesh

Required text

There is no text for this course. We will rely on a combination of freely available resources in the spirit of the Internet itself.

Goals

This seminar introduces students to the concepts and terminology of Internet technology, helping them build the fundamental skills necessary to create, host and maintain a website. Students learn about domain names, web hosting providers, HTTP, FTP, and best working practices in creating a web site. Students leave this course with confidence in their ability to get a website online.

Prerequisites: Foundations of Digital Design and Digital Imaging: Adobe Photoshop 1 or equivalent experience.

Perhaps there is no more suitable way of defining the character of the electric age than by first studying the rise of the idea of transportation as communication, and then the transition of the idea from transport to information by means of electricity. The word "metaphor" is from the Greek meta plus pherein, to carry across or transport. In this book we are concerned with all forms of transport of goods and information, both as metaphor and exchange. Each form of transport not only carries, but translates and transforms, the sender, the receiver, and the message. --Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan

Syllabus

Web 1 Syllabus
Week Topic Lecture Readings & Exercises
1 Introduction to computers Introduction to the course and to each other. We will discuss our expectations for the course and our prior experience with the Internet and computer technology.

There will be a broad overview of the course, the course materials and computer access, and the SAIC facilities followed by one on one sessions with each student.

We will discuss the hardware components of a computer: hardware, peripherals, software and recording media.
2 Users, computers, software and files. We will examine at an atomic level the interactions which take place between the user and the computer system, the computer system and its parts.

Four topics for tonight

  1. Networking and HTTP
  2. Manipulating Raster and Vector graphics, and file construction: our friends gif, jpg, and png
  3. Creating our first html page
  4. Linking 2 pages, and linking to an image
3 Setting up our sites: Linking, paths, and tags

We will setup our web space accounts and tour the features of Dreamweaver.

We will review the structure of an HTML page and using color.

As an in class exercise we will setup our project workspaces and work with relative paths, linking, and exploring different types of tags.
4 HTML review and Introduction to CSS We will finish our overview of HTML tags, review relative and absolute linking and setup your own password protected directories.
5 XHTML and CSS workshop We will review XHTML and CSS concepts and continue our in class exercises. We will examine tags for linking and tables. See last week's links.
6 Hosting your website: Web hosting services, Domain Name Servers, Registrars, Mail We will discuss in depth how to configure your e-mail, domain name servers, register your domain names and setup your own password protected directories.

resources
7 Review, overview of web2.0 social + service We will review the course contents. In particular, we will review:
  • Networking
  • The workspace and projects
  • File formats: jpg, gif, html, etc.
  • Publishing: relative, absolute, etc.
  • Tags and html formats
  • The future