Information separated from main description page on 29 March 2007 by Gio, minor upadtes by Gio 8 Jan 2008.
This course, originally numbered CS99, started many years ago, when the web was still novel to many people, and even to Stanford students. The idea was then to use the course to create a guidbook for the web, with the sudents individually focusing on one topic and contributing a chapter or a substantiol section. In earlier years several chapters for a book were created. A description of this Web-book is given in a Introductory Chapter. A list of all chapters given is found there as List of Chapters.
Now the web has become ubiquitous, and Stanford students have all had substantial experience in using in the web and have exploited the web and its resources for their projects. Often students have already contributed to the web's resources, perhaps by having set up an enterprise open to the web-based public.
We are keeping these background notes and the pages that are linked from this page around, but are not trying to keep the actual contents up-to-date. If some of the material strikes you as being quaint, so be it. You may want to return now to the current course description page.
[Early] Detailed Course Description
We will use the first week to present the technology at a conceptual level, largely by comparing the Internet 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. Neither is it a course in technical details in Internet technology. A prerequisite for this course is having some facility in using computers and exploring the world-wide web. We know that most students are already 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 and mange its contents.
The aggregation of all the information webpages will be a guide for traveling the
Information Highways: Maps, Encounters, and Directions.
- Digital libraries (draft on-line) promise universal accessibility to all that is and will be written. Anyone can be a reader and an author. No drivers licenses are required for traveling on the electronic highways. The filtering role of publishers, reviewers, indexers, booksellers, and librarians is changing radically. New business are springing up to replace traditional functions. New models for information creation and dissemination become essential to assess value to the readers and opportunities for authors. This course, by publishing its results on the web, will provide its own experiment.
- The direct contents if the Internet is information, but information is non functional unless employed. The primary use of information is planning (not yet on-line), the assessment of current state and resources, projecting the effect of possible actions into the future, and then selecting which actions create the highest benefit at lowest cost.
- Changes in education (some material on-line) are expected to occur. They will exploit greatly the capabilities that have been developed to support entertainment. When lectures with live presentations and interactive textbooks are available to all, how will educational institutions distinguish themselves on the Internet? We will need metrics to let students assess and select courses and faculty when choices are many and remote. Future textbooks can be composed to match a specific curriculum. Formulas will show their results on-line. How significant is the entertainment component of a course versus its intellectual and conceptual contents?
- Healthcare (some material on-line) today is in a critical balance between services and costs. There is plentiful medical advice on the web, but assessing it for ones own sake is difficult and risky. New technologies can be disseminated rapidly. The role differentiation of the specialist expert versus the local family provider may sharpen when significant portions of healthcare services can be delivered remotely.
- Electronic commerce (layout on-line) is still in its infancy. While direct inspection of goods to be purchased is lost, the buyer has gained access to the entire world market. Better descriptions, perhaps with dynamic simulations, have to compensate for lack of direct interaction. When parts of larger systems are purchased standards for their interoperation are crucial. Trust in the presentations and delivery has to be gained. New payment mechanisms are being tried to simplify electronic purchasing and reduce the overhead costs per transaction. New intermediate businesses help to manage electronic commerce, and provide the mix of services now allocated to designers, producers, buyers, distributors, and retailers.
- The making of laws and governmental regulations can be aided by increased public participation through the Internet
- Security and protection of privacy (draft on-line) is a concern for many. There is impressive technology in encryption, but it can protect crooks as well as legitimate businesses. The tradeoff of having an open society and protecting individuals from intrusion by snoopers, competitors, and aggressive marketeers is in flux. Security on the electronic highways poses new challenges for defense, for legal developments, and for technological support.
- The ability of the Internet to span continents as easy as one's neighborhood is changing tradiotional economic concepts. The complexities of outsourcing affects busisnesses, individuals, and government to an increasing extent.
There are a number of optional topics that may be selected if interest warrants:
Technologies and services that are relevant include
Projecting the current rate of advances into future (not yet on-line) periods, say, when our current freshman class will graduate, is a major 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.
Stanford's students will be active contributors within this world. Since we cannot predict the shape, and the rate of its arrival, we must cover more than solely what we know and have experienced. Preparing for a future without ongoing 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 used, 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.
For B2B communication a representation that uses more formal semantics to describe contents, XML, is becoming dominant. This eXtended Markup Language is also briefly described.
The end
Go back to the main description page.
