Transcript introduction to the course

ITR 3 Introduction
Thomas Krichel
2002-09-03
About me
• Born 1965, in Völklingen (Germany)
• Studied economics and social sciences at
the Universities of Toulouse, Paris, Exeter
and Leiceister.
• PhD in theoretical macroeconomics
• Lecturer in Economics at the University of
Surrey 1993 and 2001
• Since 2001 assistant professor at the
Palmer School
Why
• During research assistantship period,
(1990 to 1993) I was constantly frustrated
with difficult access to scientific literature.
• At the same time, I discovered easy
access to freely downloadable software
over the Internet.
• I decided to work towards downloadable
scientific documents. This lead to my
library career (eventually).
Steps taken I
• 1993 founded the NetEc project at
http://netec.mcc.ac.uk, later available at
http://netec.ier.hit-u.ac.jp as well as at
http://netec.wustl.edu.
• These are networking projects targetted to
the economics community. The bulk is
– Information about working papers
– Downloadable working papers
– Journal articles were added later
Steps taken II
• Set up RePEc, a digital library for
economics research. Catalogs
– Research documents
– Collections of research documents
– Researchers themselves
– Organizations that are important to the
research process
• Decentralized collection, model for the
open archives initiative
Steps taken III
• Co-founder of Open Archives Initiative
• Work on the Academic Metadata Format
• Current interests
– Collaborative gathering of academic
databases
– Incentive mechanisms to provide free
bibliographic data
– Social issues surrounding free online
scholarship
ITR3
• Homepage to be built at
http://wotan.liu.edu/home/krichel/itr3p01a
• work plan to be decided upon today. I will
first set out what has traditionally been
covered.
• And of course I have some innovative
ideas.
Why study IT?
• Make better use of the tools
• Self-help when there a problems
• Reduce dependency on computer
professionals
• Conceptual challenge
• Point and click is not sufficient
• Stepping stone to more advanced stages
of information processing, e.g.
programming
Maurer (undated)
• Introduction
• Logic and numbering
system
• Software
• Architecture (3)
• Video, Peripherals
• Dismantle PC
• Communication
• LAN, WAN, Internet
• Multimedia & graphics
• Site visit, survey
glossary
• Project presentations
• Final exam
Hunter (1999)
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Introduction to class
Overview of computers
Bits and bytes
Components
Architecture (2)
Data storage
Storage media
Memory
Input devices
Displays
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Printers
Input/output
Operating systems
Multimedia
Simulation and VR
Laptops
Communications
Networks
Internet (2)
Issues: ethics, privacy
Thomas thinks
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Hardware vs software
Emerging technologies such as XML
Isolated PC vs networked PC
Using PC as an individual tool vs provision
of public services
• Learning from books vs learning by doing
and/or from Internet sources.
• Closed source vs open source software
Software teaching
• Teaching of proprietary software is bad.
• Teaching of free user-level software is
bad.
• But that leaves the whole are of system
administration in non-proprietary software
environments.
• Installing free software is not trivial.
• Example: how to run a web server
The networked PC
• Teaching networks in this course is bad.
• But the computer really becomes
interesting as an information rather than a
data processing tool once it is networked.
• It is interesting to look at PCs in the way
they handle networks. Unfortunately this is
operating system dependent.
Debian to the rescue
• Debian is a free operating system.
• It contains over 9000 packages. Each
package is a software tool. Impossible to
learn completely.
• Information about it is mainly on the
Internet.
• It can use the linux kernel.
• It is difficult to install.
• It is easy to update.
Debian installation to supplement
traditional course
• Students will learn more about system
administration. This is more important than
hardware. On a free operating system, we
can justify covering it.
• Learning by doing gets across some
important concepts used in the software.
• Linux and X11 can have a bad time
working with hardware. Hardware
knowledge can be applied there.
Practical problems
• Computers are available.
• Network cards on these computers may be
problematic.
• Debian initial installation is best done in a big
chunk of time. Once the computers are up, they
can be used over the network.
– If they are at school, we have a firewall and address
problem.
– If they are at home, we have a address problem and
need to know about home networking.
• Assignment could cover exploring the
capabilities of particular software pieces.