September 26, 2008 Archives

These are notes I'll refer to during tomorrow's lecture.. you're welcome to explore these, but I'm not asking you to read them all in advance. (I hope that, after the lecture, you might be intrigued enough to come back and explore these links as you begin developing your own web sites.)

The theory of hypertext existed long before the WWW

• Vannevar Bush imagined the Memex. ("As We May Think," 1945)
• Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (the component of the Internet that uses hyperlinks). His FAQ page for kids is full of technical and philosophical gems.

Kilian wrote "Writing for the Web" for an audience that was familiar with the print world, and needed to be introduced to the internet. (Note that his chapters refer to 1950s slang and 1970s sitcoms.)   When I first started making web sites, most educators simply thought of web sites as convenient ways to reduce photocopying costs (by telling people to download and print out whatever handouts they wanted).

The SHU blogosphere, and more specifically my strategy of getting you to read and link to each other's blogs, to write richly hyperlinked essays, and to create a mini index on every page of the EL236 website, is designed to take advantage of the fact that with every link we create, we teach the World Wide Web what matters to us.

Michael Wesh created an eloquent video that explains it all. (Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us.)

Ok.. so that was exciting. What do we do with all these ideas?