Transcript File - MEC Information Literacy Instruction

Using the Internet
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Information revolution – last half of 20th
Century
Internet – greatest technical innovation of the
20th Century
Profound effect on our daily lives
Revolutionized communication, business,
research, & entertainment, worldwide
Gigantic library, shopping mall, entertainment
center, recreation park, meeting place,
communication device, virtual classroom
Global community, no geographical limitations
Using the Internet
Elaborate series of interconnected
networks linking millions of computers
around the world.
 US Defense Dept in 1960s
 1990s academics are joined by
commercial enterprises
 Accessed by over 958mill a year
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Using the Internet
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Networks – basic element
 Computers connected thru a communication
channel
○ Telephone cable, fiber-optic cable, high-speed
microwave or satellite communication device
Local Area Network (LAN) – small
geographic area, single channel
 Wide Area Network (WAN) – connects
LANs
 Local, regional, national, international
networks
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Using the Internet
Software to send and receive information –
TCP/IP (Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol suite
 Internet often called – TCP/IP network
 ISP (Internet Service Provider)
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 Cable television modem, digital subscriber lines
(DSL), wireless satellite, dial-up connection
Client/server model of data transfer
 “host” machine distributes info, “client
machine” receives info
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Using the Internet
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Email
Listserve
 Combination of email & discussion group
 Need to subscribe
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Email domains
 Edu, com, gov, mil, net, org, ru
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FTP (file transfer protocol)
 ws_ftp, CuteFTP
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WWW – multimedia formats
Pre-web Internet – email, FTP, Telnet,
Usenet News
Using the Internet
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Hypertext or hypermedia – links
HTML (hypertext markup language)
 tags
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Animations – Java
Blog – Weblog
Browser
URL (uniform resource locator)
 http:// (hypertext transfer protocol) – Internet access
protocol
 www.mec.cuny.edu – domain address for the server,
location
 /library – specific page, file
Using the Internet
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Google, Yahoo – search engines
4 common features
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Spiders, crawlers
Store pages in the database
Analyze & rank the data
Keyword search
Methods of collecting, indexing, & ranking
could be different
Meta tags
Deep Web – 84%
 Not linked pages, contents of online databases, sites
requiring registration, limit access of spiders
Using the Internet
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Mediated search engine (directory) - Yahoo
Keyword search engine - Google
Meta – search engine – Dogpile
Subject search engine – Findlaw, FirsGov
Boolean, AND, NOT, +,Phrase searching – “ ”
Natural language searching – ignoring common
words (is, for, the, of)
 Recognition & weighting of word combinations
 Exact matching
 Proximity of search terms in the document
 # of times the term occurs in the document
Using the Internet
Evaluating – from pure nonsense to
highly respected scholarly research
 Is it up-to-date?
 Quality control – responsibility of user
 ISOC – Internet Society
 Spam, Phishing, Hoaxes, Pornography
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