Slide 1
Greetings!  Welcome to COM 333, Communicating through Internet.  My name is Burks Oakley, and I’ll be facilitating this section of COM 333 this semester.  This first lecture is an introduction to our online class, and also a brief primer on the Internet.

Slide 2
First of all, let’s talk about our class sessions this semester.  We are not planning to meet face to face as a class this semester.  This should be an interesting experiment for most of us, certainly for me, and for those of you who have not taken an online class before.  But I want to assure you that help will always be available.  The easiest way to contact me is by e-mail – my e-mail address is oakley@uis.edu.  I usually read my e-mail by 6 am every day, and continue checking it throughout the day until early evening.  I am also available much of the time using the AOL Instant Messenger software, my screen name is “BurksO2”.  Feel free to have a real-time chat with me anytime that you see I am online.  Of course, you can reach me by phone – my office number is 217-244-6465, and that is an Urbana number.  Finally, we will be using WebBoard as a forum for class discussions and to communicate with one another.

Slide 3
Using WebBoard, we will answer questions several times each week and conduct discussions.  Also your final paper presentations will be made in WebBoard.  In order to give you your individual logon to WebBoard I will need your e-mail address.  I’ll be attempting to contact you before the first week of classes.  If you happen to view this lecture prior to that time, please e-mail me your address.  Of course, only students formally enrolled in this course will have access to the class WebBoard.  There is help available for those who have not used WebBoard before.  The tutorial is on the web at the address shown on your screen:  http://otel.uis.edu/webboard

Slide 4
For each virtual class session we will have a regular routine.  You may participate anytime during the week; day or night, Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday-whenever.  There will be two lectures each week – one posted on Monday, one on Thursday.  You should visit our classroom website and listen to the lecture and view the slides associated with the lectures.  You should also visit all of the links associated with each lecture; that is, all of the hyperlinks on the syllabus that are associated with that lecture.  Then you should go to the WebBoard and answer the discussion question for that lecture.  And so as we move through the semester lecture by lecture, you will have viewed the lectures, visited all of the hyperlinks, and will have answered the discussion questions.  I expect that you also will read the answers that the other students post to the class WebBoard, and comment on their answers – this will be our online equivalent to class discussion.  The great advantage of this online approach to teaching and learning is you can do everything on your own time.  So you can do it morning, noon or night on any of the days during the week.

Slide 5
If you have any questions at anytime through the course of the semester, e-mail me or I.M. me or phone me or post a note on the WebBoard.  Finally, I suggest that you look at the website “What Makes a Successful Online Student?” – it is at:  http://Illinois.online.uillinois.edu/IONresources/StudentProfile.html.  You will find that you need to develop certain skills to be successful online – and I really want each and every one of you to succeed in this course and in future online courses you may take.

Slide 6
Well, let’s talk for just a moment about how the Internet itself works.  Really the key components of the Internet were developed some years ago.  The two protocols are Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP).  TCP is the protocol that breaks up the information passed on the Internet into small packets – the information could be e-mail or web pages or even streaming audio.  TCP divides those pieces of information into small packets and those packets then are routed from place to place on the Internet.  So for example: if you were taking the course in my home town of Quincy, IL, and you were bringing up the COM 333 web page, you would enter the address for that site into your browser and the information from the site would be sent to you in packets from Springfield to Quincy, where they would appear in your computer and be displayed on your monitor.  And TCP would have divided the information on the website into these packets – perhaps you might call them envelopes of information, because they do have addresses associated with them.  The other one of the protocols is Internet Protocol, or IP.  IP is related to Internet addressing.  IP addresses are analogous to telephone numbers with area codes or perhaps street addresses with zip codes.  For example, 192.102.230.250 is the IP address for the main UIS webserver:  www.uis.edu.  So if in your browser (Netscape or Internet Explorer), instead of typing http://www.uis.edu  you were to type http://192.102.230.250, up would come the UIS home page.  Computers called “Domain Name Servers” (abbreviated DNS) translate the name into an IP address.  And so, when you type in www.uis.edu, the DNS translates it into 192.102.230.250.  Routers are another key component of the Internet.  They are dedicated computers that are linked together via optical fibers.  Perhaps in some cases via terrestrial microwave links, etc.  And those routers are smart traffic controllers, that is; as packets of information are being sent to you, the routers will route your packets around any slowdowns or outages so that the information will almost always reach your computer.

Slide 7
When we talk about Internet, we really should pay attention to our cases.  An uppercase “I” for Internet means the Internet that we are using right now – the mother of all Internets.  If you use a lower case “i”, it really becomes a generic term.  The generic term of internet is an interconnection of computer networks.  So there can be multiple Internets out there.  You know another term that has become more popular recently is the term intranet.  Intranet uses those same TCP-IP protocols, but on a little self-contained Internet.  Intranet is really kind of a small stand-alone Internet that services perhaps an agency, a department, or maybe a corporation.  Well, where did the Internet come from?  Really the Internet began, gosh quite some time ago, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s with ARPANET.  That is the Department of Defense Advanced Research Project.  And that ARPANET was developed to link together primarily research universities and major engineering firms.  As they were working on satellite and submarine and missile projects for the Department of Defense and back in the early 70’s facsimile machines were not nearly as ubiquitous as they are now and it was difficult to pass detailed information among institutions.  For example: Stanford University on the west coast might be working on the same project that MIT was on the east coast and for them to share blueprints of let’s say of a satellite it would take some time using “snail mail” or a terrestrial delivery service of some sort.  And so the Department of Defense came up with a concept of developing a kind of interconnection between computers - the Internet - that would allow the sharing of data between computers in different places.  Well, a huge breakthrough on the Internet took place in the early 1990’s, in ‘91 and ‘92, when Tim Berners-Lee, an engineer in Geneva, Switzerland, developed HTML.  HTML is the acronym for hypertext markup language.  That’s the language of the web.  That is what allows us to have graphical browsers.  In fact, the first graphical browser was developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and it was called Mosaic.  It was developed in large part by Marc Andreeson, who was an undergraduate student worker.  After leaving Urbana, he became one of the founders of Netscape Communications Corporation, where he and others developed the Netscape browser.

Slide 8
Well, the commercialization of the Internet had a huge effect since Tim Berners-Lee developed HTML.  Microsoft developed Internet Explorer by rewriting the original Mosaic software that was developed at the University of Illinois.  Commercial entities found that the web is a tremendous advertising tool, a way to get information out.  The Internet started growing very rapidly from the time Mosaic was released in 1993.  You can find more information about the growth of the Internet at the NUA link and the Georgia Tech link, which I have included on our syllabus for this lecture.  Also, the consumer index link gives us a sense of the trends and usage of the Internet among consumers.  We will talk about this in more detail later.  Where are we going with the Internet?  A key component of the future is what we call digital convergence – that is various media, radio, television, even telephones are coming together in a digital format.  You know, an example of that might be records, audio recordings of music.  Some of you remember (I hope) the days of vinyl, when we had long playing records and then not that long ago in the late 1980’s came the development of CD’s-compact discs, and all of the sudden audio became a digital medium.  And now many of you don’t have record players at home, but perhaps have a couple of CD players.  Well that was the movement from analog to digital in audio.  The same is now taking place in television – from analog video to digital video. And the same is taking place with telephones, from an analog signal that runs on a carrier frequency over copper wires to a digital signal that is carried over optical fibers.  All of these media are coming together in what we now call the Internet.  The next generation Internet, called Internet 2, is well under construction.  Internet 2 is a research and education Internet that goes back to kind of the roots of the Internet.  And really will not involve commercial activity.  But Internet 2 is linking of hundred of college and universities and ultimately K-12 schools and community colleges using Internet technology to share audio, video, databases, and other educational and library information.  Internet 3 is already in the works and we’ll see further development of commercial applications for the Internet.  Of course, we will be talking more about this as we progress through the course.

Slide 9
Well, I’m going to keep this first lecture short.  What’s your next step?  Your next step is really to go to the online syllabus and make sure you visit all of the links that we have for this lecture.  Go to each of those sites - now no doubt you won’t have time to go to every place on every one of those links, but at least to go the first link for each one and explore that link.  We have some great links on the history of Internet.  We have those links I mentioned earlier – look at those surveys of users of the web and get a sense of who’s using the Internet right now.  Make sure you fill out the student information form and send it to me – it will be self-explanatory.  And also then log into the WebBoard and answer the discussion question for this lecture.  Don’t forget to fill out your user profile in WebBoard.  The remaining lectures for this section of COM 333 will be given by Prof. Ray Schroeder, who originally created the online version of COM 333.  So don’t be surprised when you hear a different voice in lecture 2.  Thanks for joining me and I’ll talk to you again soon.