In 1957 the USSR and America were Cold War enemies and we were in an arms (weapons) race. We thought we were evenly matched in the race until they launched the first satellite named Sputnik that orbited over us daily. Suddenly Americans were behind in the race so we created a government agency to change that called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Twelve years later we put a man on the moon. ARPA later became DARPA with the D standing for Defense.
What does that have to do with the Internet? Well, everything! All around the country we had military bases and at many of them we had large computers (a fairly new invention at the time). ARPA connected each of those computers to every other computer and created the first large computer network that covered the country called ARPANET (ARPA Network). So if there were 100 computers each computer had a 100 wires coming out of the back of it to physically connect it to all the others. That’s a lot of wire. But it allowed them to always be capable of sending information from one computer to any other in case some computers were disabled by the enemy in time of war.
They could also split the messages up into many parts called ‘packets’ and send them over different parts of the network. Each packet had the address of the destination computer and the original message could be reassembled when all the packets arrived. If there was a technical problem in one transmission line only part of the message would be lost or, even better, the information could route itself around the problem in the network and still arrive at its destination. This would also prevent a spy from intercepting the entire message and instead only get a fragment of it. This was called packet switching (later TCP/IP) and it is very similar to the way computers send messages to each other today over networks. So essentially ARPANET was the birth of the present-day Internet.
This network was such a useful tool that non-military people wanted to use it, like university professors and researchers. They did until the military decided it was a bad idea in terms of security and kicked them off in 1975. Undeterred the non-military people just started building their own networks to share information. After all there were a lot of people needing to share information electronically and the post office wouldn’t do. They got money from the National Science Foundation and by 1984 the nation-wide network became known as the NSFNET.
They invented a software package that worked like the packet switching on ARPANET called TCP/IP (Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). As long as all the computers on the network had it they could all talk to each other and send messages, like e-mail. The ARPANET was dismantled in 1990 but NSFNET had grown and was well used.
Keep in mind that surfing the Internet even in 1990 meant typing in an IP address on a black and white screen with no pictures, just text. All you’d get would be text downloaded from someone else’s computer with out color or graphics. Those had to be opened in a separate graphics program. You really had to know what you were doing to use the Internet and there wasn’t a lot of fun stuff because most information was technical research information. One generally useful function was e-mail.
In 1992 Tim Berners-Lee changed all that. He was a physicist in Switzerland who wanted to share his research with others over a computer network but wanted to make it look more interesting. He used SGML (later HTML) to create web pages with his information on them, which included hypertext links. Now you could just use your mouse (a recent addition to PC’s) to point and click to get from one person’s computer to another without typing in an address. It caught on quickly and the World Wide Web was born.
Soon after in 1993 Marc Andreessen who worked at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) created the first Web browser called Mosaic. It combined the functions of different software and now you could view other people’s web pages with color, fonts, and graphics. Suddenly using the Internet became so easy anyone could do it... and they did. Growth in people using the Internet went from 1,000 people in 1984 to about one million in 1992.
Many other changes took place too. Bandwidth, which is the size of the ‘pipes’ or digital stream that deliver information across the Internet through phone lines, had to get a lot bigger to handle all the traffic and the large files being moved from one computer to another. Bigger ‘pipes’ also made information transfer faster.
PC’s evolved from the text-only interface of the old IBM’s to using a Graphical User Interface (GUI pronounced “gooey”) better known as Windows. Instead of typing in text commands, the screen has a graphical display with commands given to the computer by clicking with a mouse. Finally, computers got faster, storage space got bigger, and software got more sophisticated. Ten to twelve years ago the average person did not have a clue about the Internet. All of these changes have occurred in such a short time and have made the present-day Internet possible.
Probably the biggest misconception is that the World Wide Web and the Internet are the same thing. The WWW is largest and most popular of the parts that make up the Internet. The Internet is made up of individual computers all over the world that are turned on and connected by access lines so they can communicate. The WWW is a little more. It is all of those computers on the Internet that have a web page file written in a language called HTML and that have it available to share with other computers on the Internet.
The WWW itself physically consists of five different things that allow computers to communicate. The Web consists of your personal computer, the access lines that connect it to your Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) server, routers and switches that direct your communications over the phone lines, and the servers that store the web pages (HTML files) that are sent to your computer.
Every computer connected to the Internet has a name and a number that identifies it to the other computers with which it is communicating. The name is called a host name and the number is called an IP address. Both mean the same thing but since computers deal in numbers and people find it easier to remember a name, both are used. The domain name is part of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which is like a postal address for a resource or site on the WWW and the convention the Web uses for locating file and other remote services. It tells the computers involved in your Internet communication what type of access you are using, the part of the Internet it is located in, the name of the computer it is on, and the folder the file is located in on that computer.
When you type in the URL into the address window on your browser you are asking another computer (a server) to send you a file it has stored on its computer. That file is just the text and commands of the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) written in a certain way to make words and graphics appear on the screen. That file is sent over the access lines to your computer and is saved on your hard drive. Your Internet browser is a special program designed to read the HTML code in the file and then display the words, graphics, etc. on your screen. You never see the HTML code unless you ask the computer to show it to you.
The first page you come to on a site usually is the home page or index. It introduces you to the site and what’s on it, very similar to a title page and table of contents in a real book. From the home page you can click on hypertext links (usually blue, underlined text but not neccessarily) that connect to another web page on the same site or one on a different site. The home page and all of the associated web pages together are known as a web site.
Suppose you went to the library to find some books on music for a class project and there was no card catalog to tell you the name of the books you wanted on the subject. Furthermore, none of the books had catalog numbers and were just randomly put on the shelf. What a useless library! You could begin searching through the shelves looking for books on your subject but it would take many hours of looking to find them.
This is essentially the problem the Web had in the beginning until search engines were invented. They are like the subject index card catalog of the Web. They tell you the names of web sites containing information on the topic you have asked it about. As you probably know a simple search of the word ‘music’ would turn up many thousands of sites. It actually gives far too many sites on your subject but it is more useful than blindly searching one site after another to see if it applies to what you need. More on the problem of too many sites on the list later, but first let’s see how search engines work.
Indexing search engines are just big databases that store web site information gathered by a piece of software called a spider. Real spiders crawl around on webs and these "web spiders" crawl around the World Wide Web. They actually go to every site on the Web (all 6 million +) and catalogs a copy of every page. This is stored in its database on a big hard drive. When it goes through every web site it starts over and looks for any changes that have been made since its last visit.
When you type in a word or words in the search blank of an indexing search engine it looks for that information on every page in its database and gives you a list of those pages. It does this in less than a second and that is amazing. Examples of indexing search engines that do this very thorough kind of search are google.com, altavista.com, northernlight.com and webcrawler.com. Indexes are clearly the best to use when you need exact or detailed information like when you are doing research.
There is actually a second type of search engine called a directory. These are sites like yahoo.com, excite.com and infoseek.com and they don’t really search for sites to catalog. They rely on the people who make web sites to submit them to the directory. When you search on directories it only looks for your key words in the first twenty words mentioned on the web site and only those sites someone has actually sent to them. Information on directories may not be the most current because every time someone updates their web site they have to resubmit it for the directory to have the latest version. Directories usually hire people to categorize sites to make it easier for people to click on a subject and find sites with that information. Many sites actually pay directories to get their site’s name higher on the list under a particular subject.
Now back to indexing search engines. When I type ‘music’ into google.com I get 106,000,000 pages on the Web that have the word music mentioned on them. No one has enough time left in their lifetime to read each of those sites to see if they have what you want. I’ll bet your research topic is a bit narrower than just ‘music’ like ‘rock music from the 1960’s’. Narrowing my search down to this particular topic gives me only 330,000 web pages that mention the words ‘music’, ‘rock’, ‘1960’. I would search this way: music AND rock AND 1960’s.
What I am doing is using a form of a Boolean search. Named after Charles Boole who developed an algebra of logic which is used in searching computer databases. Boolean operators are the words (AND, OR, and NOT) placed between the key words of a search that instruct the search engine to narrow or broaden your search. For instance:
|
music AND rock |
Gives you only sites with both words on them. |
|
music OR rock |
Gives you sites with either word or both words on them. |
|
music NOT rock |
Gives you all sites that have the word ‘music’ unless it has the word ‘rock’. |
These help greatly when trying to narrow down your search to a manageable number of web pages to look through for good information. There are also a few other tools that search engines use in an advanced search. This is not an exhaustive list.
|
“The Sound of Music” |
Placing quotation marks around more than one key word will find sites where the words are found right next to each other in the same order. Known as a phrase search. |
|
music NEAR rock |
The operator NEAR returns sites where two key words are found within 10 words of each other. |
|
music AND (rock OR classical) |
Parenthesis can be used to shorten a search and to group complex Boolean phrases like the distributive property in mathematics. |
|
+ and - |
Some search engines use a + for AND and the – for NOT because it is easier to type. |
|
Cars |
Search engines are case sensitive so capitalizing your key word will only find sites with the capitalized version of that word. Using lower cased key words will find both upper and lower case versions. |
|
Garden* |
Using truncation will expand your search and give you every possible ending (or beginning) of the key word like gardens, gardener, gardening, etc. |
All search engines and searchable databases on the Web have their own rules for using Boolean operators in searches of their databases. Before you use a search engine, find out exactly how each search engine works. To do this you will need to read the information under the advanced search link. We will work with Boolean operators in class to get the hang of it. Using them will greatly enhance your research ability.
Getting your search narrowed down to a manageable number of sites to look through for information is only the beginning. Anyone with a computer and an opinion can publish information on the Web. Needless to say there is a lot of bad information out there. So how do you tell the good from the bad?
You need to ask some questions of the information you are evaluating.
For further discussion of this issue, visit the World Wide Web Virtual Library, which contains an excellent set of resources for evaluating Internet information.
When doing research it is very important to give credit to the source of the information. There are four reasons for this. First it may be copyrighted. A copyright protects a piece of work (artwork, documents, etc.) from reproduction without permission from the work’s author. This includes material in an electronic format, such as information found on the Internet. Therefore, it is necessary to cite the sources. Copyright laws may protect material found on the Internet even if a copyright notice is not displayed.
The second reason you need to cite your source is that you need to make it clear to your reader that the information they are reading did not originate with you. You can’t take the work of others and call it your own for the same reason you can’t take something out of a store without paying for it.
The third reason it that the person reading your work may need to go to your source to find out more information. Finally, citing your source also adds credibility to your work. It shows the reader that there is a published, and hopefully professional, source to your information not just your opinion.
A widely accepted form of citation is published by the Modern Language Association (MLA) in its publication MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Fifth Edition. The guidelines for referencing electronic material are similar to the MLA guidelines for printed material, with the addition of a few items. Referencing material access through the Internet should include the date it was accessed and the URL:
Author’s Last Name, First Name MI. “Title of the Material.” Title of periodical, newletter, or something similar Volume number or similar (Date of publication): Number of pages or paragraphs or n. page for no pagination. Access date <URL>
It has been said that integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is looking. When you are using the Internet it is easy to feel that it is a place where anything goes. Most of the time there is no one watching and other computers and people you communicate with are far away, even in other countries. But what you do on the Internet does matter when no one is watching. It matters to your character formation, it matters to the other people with whom you are communicating and the information you are using.
Etiquette refers to the conventional rules of personal behavior in polite society. Ethics has to do with what is right and wrong, legal and illegal in society. In other words, if you break a rule of etiquette it is considered rude, like putting your feet on the table during dinner. However, if you break a rule of ethics it’s considered a crime and you could be arrested like stealing something from a store.
Just as you need to learn behaviors which are acceptable at school and in society, students need to learn the correct procedures and rules for using the Internet. Netiquette, the etiquette of the Net, and Nethics, the ethics of the Net, are the rules of the information superhighway. Before communicating with this important research tool, it is important to understand the many consequences of the new computer connections that will be made. This powerful educational tool is a privilege. It can provide countless hours of exploration and use, but like a drivers license, it is a privilege that can be taken away for breaking the rules.
You’re not dealing with computers, your dealing with people. When interacting with someone on the Internet, be careful what you say. Your writing has to be much more clear than your conversation, to avoid misinterpretation. Sending a message that is strongly critical is called a “flame”. To avoid “flaming”, never say anything to someone that you would not say to them in person. Avoid the use of sarcasm and be careful with humor. Without voice inflections and body language, remarks can be misinterpreted.
Do not post personal information about anyone. The Internet is becoming a very crowded place. Like society as a whole, there are nice people and there are not-so-nice people. Do not give out your home phone number or your address to anyone.
Be brief. More people will read your information if it is short and clear. This also helps to conserve space on computers.
Do not harass users. If someone asks that you not contact them, you must stop all contact immediately. You may feel you have the right to freedom of expression, but others have the right to be free from harassment.
Be careful of copyrights. Cut and paste functions make electronic media extremely easy to use when communicating one’s own, as well as others’ ideas. As long as you are using an article for educational purposes and not selling it, you may use the information. It is important, however, to cite all references.
Double check downloads. There are many software products available on the Internet. Many of these products are offered free of charge. Be sure the software product you are downloading is not a commercial product that has been distributed illegally. Most commercial software products have a title screen with a copyright statement.
Give credit where credit is due. Remember, the work that someone has placed on the Internet is free for you to use, but if you do use it, give the writer or creator credit. Sometimes it is difficult to determine the references for information on the Internet. It is important to give as much information as possible including: the Internet site address, the author’s name, title of information, organization, copyright date, city, and any other information about the source.
To avoid plagiarism when writing a paper using information from any source other than yourself here are some good rules to follow. If you use the information in your source word for word the words must be in quotes and they must be the exact words. If the information you put in your paper is not general knowledge then you need to cite the source of that information in the text of your paper after you are finished stating facts from that source. Finally, cite all sources that you used in your research both in the text of your paper and on a separate works cited page. Following these four rules will prevent you from plagiarizing information in your work.
The Ten Commandments for Computer Ethics
Suarez, Patrick J. - "The Beginner's Guide to the Internet", Published 2000 http://www.dematha.com/code/vbs/bgi/frame.asp Access Date: 10/17/03
Stephanie Knight sknight@aiamail.com