Community Media Design

In this course students re-invent Lang’s student newspaper as a web-based community for Lang College. Focusing on questions of how to translate a print-based medium into an interactive community, students consider what additional technological experience needs be added; how an electronic newspaper is read and used; what links to include to other portions of the university, the city, and the world. Working with a Web designer, students build and test a prototype. The course involves learning about how online communities work, and an examination of what the different kinds of online community are. It involves survey Some prior technical knowledge is preferred. This course also satisfies a requirement for Writing. ing Lang students about their online habits and needs.

Co-taught by Karl Mendonca and Mike Edwards.

Notes on Week 2

We discuss some of the history and structure of the Internet, using historyoftheinternet.org as our guide.

  • History of the Internet
    • Telegraph
    • Vannevar Bush
    • Ted H. Nelson (1960)
      • Hypertext
      • interlinked media so complex it couldn't be written on paper
      • the medium itself is important
    • RAND Corp. (1964)
      • communications network
      • withstand a nuclear attack
      • no central authority
      • this is the essence of the Internet -- by design
    • ARPANet (1969)
      • 4 nodes
        • Stanford
        • Utah
        • UCLA
        • UCSB
      • crashed on the G in login
    • First use of Internet (1975)
      • Vint Cerf
    • Usenet (1979)
      • News groups
      • alt.gossip.celebrities
      • groups.google.com
    • TCP/IP (1983)
      • flexible
      • any service can be put up on the net
      • IP Addressing
        • everyone gets a number
        • numbers are like address in the real world
    • DNS (1984)
      • Handier than remembering the IP address
      • like a shorthand for IPs, they just point to it
    • Mosaic (1993)
      • First web browser with images in the page
      • First popular browser
    • "Weblog" (1997)
      • term coined in 1997
      • arguably in existence for a while before that
      • raises an interesting question--what makes a blog a blog?
      • Early example of the read-write web
    • Google (1998)
      • Not the first search engine
      • but makes use of hypertext in a novel way
      • the algorithm