Introductions, Overview (MacKinnon, Fleischer, Cheng. 30 mins)
- Meet your instruction team.
- Go over class schedule, requirements. Answer questions.
Why all journalists need web skills (MacKinnon, 30 mins)
Digital future for everybody: The big news at the World Editors’ Forum this year was that newpapers aren’t dying, but their future depends on having a strong website with innovative multimedia coverage. The New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, and the Times of London are all examples of newspapers with “integrated newsrooms” where reporters now work as much for online as for the newspaper. See the Digital Edge Awards winners for examples of some of the best online multimedia storytelling by newspapers.
Broadcasters are expanding into the internet : CNN, the BBC and AlJazeera all recognize the need for strong online presence… Some are finding that the internet helps them reach audiences they’re not reaching at all through the TV.
Many more new web-only operations are competing strongly with long-established news organizations. Yahoo! News and the Huffington Post are two very different examples.
Lecture to conversation: Professional journalists are increasingly asked by their editors to mix it up in the “blogosphere,” or as an independent journalist you might use a blog to market your talent, ideas, and work. As a professional you aren’t just competing with amateur bloggers. You can also work with them and find ways to contribute to the public discourse in complementary ways. Global Voices, a bloggers’ network I founded, is one example of how bloggers are cooperating with journalists. But it’s important that as a professional you are at least as comfortable on the web as the average amateur media creator. Which means you need to have a basic understanding of what we call “Web 2.0″ technologies.
Basic web literacy (Fleischer, 30 mins)
Internet
The internet – or INTERnational NETwork – is a worldwide interconnection of computer networks which has its origins in the early 1960′s. As with many technological advances (such as the tin can (Appert/Durand) its initial development was driven by the needs of the military. The launch of Sputnik by the Russians (1957) led to the setting up of ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) and funding from them led to ARPANET – the first computer network in 1969.
Lengthy (but dry) early history is here
BBS (Bulletin Board System), USENET (threaded discussions), Email, FTP (File Transfer Protocol) all available in the 1960′s but only small, private networks. Gradually more and more small networks emerged but some experienced problems transmitting data using radio signals (eg AlohaNet in Hawaii). A solution was found which led to a cable standard that became Ethernet and this in turn spawned the rapid growth of Local Area Networks (LANs). LANs then connected to internet servers (first in academia then business) and the infrastructure then existed for something revolutionary.
Excellent overview of internet history is here
Superb 7-minute guide to internet history by Ethan Zuckerman
World Wide Web
Important to remember that the internet is NOT the World Wide Web (WWW). The Web is a huge collection of linked items (documents, images, multimedia etc) which are stored on web servers which are connected via the internet. The pioneer of the Web was (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee. In 1980 he worked at CERN in Geneva – then the largest internet node in Europe – and wanted to create a way for scientists to share technical data, results and documents. CERN weren’t interested. Berners-Lee went away and invented a way to transmit the documents from computer to computer (HTTP or Hypertext Transfer Protocol), a way to identify a computer (the URI/URL) and even a way to view the data (a browser called ‘WorldWideWeb‘). And after all that…CERN still wasn’t interested! So, in 1990, Berners-Lee distributed his code and ideas using the internet where it was greeted with great enthusiasm.
Now we have dozens of browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Camino, Konqueror etc etc). Users connect there individual computers to a gateway server (either via a LAN, or broadband or dial-up). Each computer has a unique IP address (eg 207.46.197.32) and the current standard IP4 allows for 4.3 billion individual addresses. It is an amazing thought that there are only 1 billion addresses left unused – not enough to cater for all the new uses the internet is being used for (VoIP, Coke machines! etc). The new protocol is IP6 which allows for 340 billion billion billion address (which should keep everyone happy for a while!)
The web would be unusable if we had to remember IP addresses and the DNS (Domain Name System) was created to overcome this problem. DNS servers contain lookup tables of domain names and their corresponding IP address. So when you type http://207.46.197.32 into your browser a DNS nameserver will locate the correct IP address and direct the browser to the correct server.
Your contribution to the Web?
If you want to put your own information on the Web you need to create a document in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). We will cover this later in the course but for now here is the most basic page you can make:
Example using notepad.
To publish your page to your own website you would need to buy a domain name (eg mygreatsite.com) and a hosting account (some space on a web server where your web pages reside. The all you do is use FTP (file transfer protocol) to upload the files to your server space. We will cover many of these things in the weeks to come.
== 15 min. BREAK ==
Lab: (75 mins)
Useful resources:
Here are some useful tutorial videos on how to use the “Edublogs” system where your blog is hosted.
Click here for some pointers on controlling “comment spam” on your blog.
In-class work:
- Set up your own blog on Uniblogs.org.
- Email your new blog’s address to: jmsc.newmedia@gmail.com
- Publish a brief blog post introducing yourself, including at least one functioning hyperlink.
