Preface

Internet is the buzzword of the millennium. Never before has a technology spread so rapidly. Never has an invention enabled so many people to do so many things—things that are strategically important to life in the information society. So strategic that being able to use the Internet has become a basic skill. So important that understanding the Internet and knowing how to communicate over it has become a literacy.

Internet literacy is what this book is about. The goal is to provide a course of study that will enable students to acquire the conceptual background and the online skills needed to become Internet literate. An important feature of this book is the way it avoids unnecessary jargon and computer terms. By focusing on the tasks that an Internet literate person should be able to accomplish, and by using software that makes those tasks easy to accomplish, this book provides a course of instruction that any college student, adult learner, or motivated high school student can successfully complete. Working through this book will enable students to use the Internet in their daily lives and become intelligent consumers of information.

Another key feature is the way this book teaches the student how to create Web pages and publish them on the World Wide Web. After learning how to use Internet search engines to conduct research, students complete a Web page creation tutorial that steps through the process of online writing and documenting Internet resources with proper bibliographic style. Thus, the student becomes a creator and a publisher, not just a consumer, of the Internet. Along the way, the student creates a home page and a Web page résumé. Several students have reported that putting their résumés on the Web helped them find jobs.

Organization

The course is organized into seven parts. Part One defines the Internet and explains how it is changing the world. After defining the basic Internet services of electronic mail, listserv, newsgroups, chat, instant messaging, videoconferencing, FTP, multimedia streaming, and the World Wide Web, the book explains how they are being used across a broad range of industries to provide people with important new capabilities, including telecommuting, home shopping, online learning, government services, and interactive television. Especially relevant to college students are the sections on teaching, learning, and interconnected scholarship.

Part Two covers the logistics of getting connected to the Internet. Students learn about Internet service providers and how to connect via telephone modems, Ethernet, ISDN, DSL, or cable modems. Then the students go online and learn how to surf the Net using a World Wide Web browser. This initial online experience is designed in such a way as to provide students with the maximum amount of Internet benefit through a minimum knowledge of technical terms and computing concepts. More knowledge of the inner workings of the Net comes in later parts of the book. Here, the focus is on ease of use and learning how to get to places and find things without getting too technical.

In Part Three, students learn how to communicate over the Internet, first through electronic mail, and then via listservs, newsgroups, and forums. Step-by-step tutorial exercises allow students to practice key concepts and develop online skills. A chapter on Internet etiquette covers rules, courtesies, and ethics that all users should observe when communicating online.

Part Four is a tutorial on how to use Internet search engines to find things online via subject-oriented searches, keyword searching, natural language searches, and metasearching. Students learn how to search scholarly databases of refereed articles as well as more general sources. In addition to searching for text, students learn how to conduct multimedia searches for pictures, animations, audio, and video. A special section on peer-to-peer file sharing sensitizes students to the ethics of sharing copyrighted works over the Internet.

In support of online writing, students learn the proper bibliographic style for citing Internet resources. MLA, APA, and CMS styles are covered. Because almost anyone can learn how to publish information on the Web, this book encourages the students to question the source and evaluate the information before citing it.

In Part Five, students learn how to establish a presence on the Internet by creating Web pages and mounting them on the World Wide Web. A chapter on Web page creation strategies helps students choose the proper tool for the task at hand. A chapter on Web page design teaches screen design principles and shows how to lay out Web page elements effectively. Then, students learn how to create a home page and a Web page résumé and publish documents on the Web. By linking their home page to their résumé and to other online resources, students experience how hyperlinks can create a world of interconnected scholarship.

Part Six brings the students’ Web pages to life by showing how to use multimedia on the Internet. After making a waveform audio recording, students learn how sounds, movies, and animations can be linked to Web pages and made to play via different kinds of multimedia controllers and streaming technologies. Then the book provides access to a large number of multimedia creation tools for making active Web pages.

Even though the Internet has already become an essential part of life in the information society, the Net still is in many ways an emerging technology that is inspiring debates about how it should evolve and become regulated. Accordingly, Part Seven gets the students involved in planning for the future of the Internet by discussing and debating the societal issues of equity, privacy, security, protectionism, censorship, decency, copyright, and fair use. Then students learn about the emerging technologies of the multimedia backbone, Internet talk radio, the real-time streaming protocol, artificial intelligence, voice recognition, text-to-speech conversion, image recognition, robots, intelligent agents, videoconferencing, Internet phone services, Webcasting, virtual reality, wireless communications, and Internet PCs.

The book concludes by showing students how to use the Internet for continued learning about the exciting new products that will be invented during the coming decades. The best listservs, newsgroups, and Web sites for keeping up with this fast-paced field are identified, and students learn how to subscribe for free.

World Wide Web Site

Accompanying this book is an Internet Literacy Web site by Pat Sine. It is called the Interlit Web site—Interlit stands for Internet Literacy. The address of the site is http://www.mhhe.com/cit/hofstetter/. It provides quick and easy access to all of the Internet resources and examples referred to in this textbook. In addition to making it easy to find things, the Interlit Web site can help save you money because almost all of the resources it uses are available free of charge.

Icons coordinate what you read in this book with what you will find at the Interlit Web site. When you see an icon in the margin of this text, you will know that you can go to the Interlit Web site for quick and easy access to that item. For example, in the Web page creation tutorial, where the book provides a layout analysis of exemplary Web pages, the Interlit Web site provides hot links that enable you to visit the exemplars and try them out.

End-of-Chapter Exercises

Throughout the course, end-of-chapter exercises provide practical, hands-on assignments for students to complete outside of class. The instructor can adjust the depth and rigor of the course by deciding which assignments to require. Highly motivated students can go ahead and complete all of the exercises, to harness the full potential of the Internet.

Progressive Case Projects

After the exercises in each chapter is a special section containing progressive case projects. These projects are called progressive because they build one upon another in a sequential fashion as the book unfolds. The student imagines being employed in a small company or school that is planning to use the Internet to improve daily operations. After completing each chapter, the student applies its content to solving a real-world need or problem related to the use of information technology in the workplace. The case projects are optional. For a quick course about the Internet, the case projects can be skipped. Longer courses can use the cases to deepen understanding by immersing students in the solution of real-world problems in the workplace. Appendix B contains an outline of the progressive case projects.

Basic Windows and Macintosh Tutorials

At six strategic locations in this book, Windows and Macintosh tutorials have been provided for inexperienced students who may need help completing basic computing tasks. The tutorials are presented at the point where students will first need them. For students or instructors who want to locate the basic Windows and Macintosh tutorials at other times, Appendix C shows where to find them.

What You Will Need to Use This Book

Internet Literacy works with both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer on both Windows and Macintosh computers. In order to complete the exercises and tutorials in this book, the student will need access to a Windows PC or a Macintosh running either Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. The student will also need an Internet account that provides the basic Internet services of e-mail, newsgroups, FTP, and the Web. Students who do not already have Internet access should refer to Part Two of this book, which provides a detailed explanation and comparison of the options for getting connected to the Internet. Although high-speed connections work best, all of the exercises in this book can be completed via modem over an ordinary telephone line.

Internet Tooklit

By working through the tutorial exercises in this book, the student will acquire a toolkit full of utilities for authoring Web pages, manipulating images, recording and editing sound, creating animations, and maintaining a Web site. Appendix A lists the utilities used in this book. Any of these utilities that the student does not already have can be downloaded from the Interlit Web site. Utilities are provided for both Windows and Macintosh computers.

Microsoft FrontPage 30-Day Trial CD

In the Web page creation tutorial that begins in Chapter 18, you will have your choice of using either Netscape Composer or Microsoft FrontPage. Netscape Composer is part of Netscape, which is available as a free download from http://www.netscape.com. If you choose Microsoft FrontPage and do not already own a copy, you can use the 30-day trial version that comes for free on the CD that is included with this book. The author is grateful to Microsoft Corporation for granting permission for McGraw-Hill to distribute the CD with this book. If you plan to use the 30-day trial version, please understand that it will expire 30 days after you install it. You should, therefore, not install it until you are actually ready to begin working on the exercises in Chapter 18. If you wait until then, 30 days will be plenty of time to complete the tutorial. Then you will be ready to consider whether you want to purchase a retail copy of Microsoft FrontPage.

Acknowledgments

I have many people to thank for making this project possible, but most of all, I want to acknowledge my students, who inspired this book through their enthusiastic participation in the experimental courses that were the precursors to what we now know as Internet Literacy. I learn more from my students than from anyone else, and I look forward to every class, not so much to teach, as to learn.

University of Delaware Research Professor L. Leon Campbell provided valuable service as the author’s “intelligent agent” on the Internet. Almost daily, Leon sent the author information about issues, trends, and new developments gleaned from his extensive surfing of the network. Leon is a valued friend and colleague.

Pat Sine, Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the University of Delaware, created the Interlit Web site that supports this book. Pat served as an invaluable resource throughout this project, and I am grateful for her expertise, dedication, and numerous contributions.

Dr. Primo Toccafondi, coordinator of the University of Delaware’s degree programs in Southern Delaware, helped the author teach Internet Literacy in a distance learning format. I will always be grateful to Toc for his many suggestions and helpful comments on drafts of the text, as well as for his camaraderie. Making new friends is one of the lifelong rewards of working on projects like this one.

At PBS, David Collings administers a distance learning program that uses this textbook to deliver an Internet Literacy course over the Web. I am grateful to David for his insight and dedication to making online courses available on the PBS network.

Rhonda Sands of McGraw-Hill served as this book’s first-edition editor, Jodi McPherson edited the second edition, and Dan Silverburg edited this third edition. I thank Rhonda, Jodi, and Dan for their many contributions, both editorial and otherwise. I am especially grateful to Dan for the thorough manner in which he conducted external reviews of this text prior to its publication. I want to thank the following reviewers for their many insights and suggestions:

Dr. Donna Austin, LSU-Shreveport

Ron Berry, Northeast Louisiana University

Dr. Gary Buterbaugh, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Carolyn Walsh Carter, Milligan College

Tim Eichers, Northern Virginia Community College

Bret Ellis, Brigham Young University, Hawaii Campus

Daris Howard, Ricks College

Robert Hubbard, Albertus Magnus College

Tim Kennedy, Bellevue Community College

Roger Lee, Houston Community College

Anita Philipp, Oklahoma City Community College

Pratap P. Reddy, Raritan Valley Community College

Jerry Ross, Lane Community College

Kala Chand Seal, Loyola Marymount University

Robert Youngblood, Arizona State University

Information Technology at McGraw-Hill/Irwin

At McGraw-Hill Higher Education, we publish instructional materials targeted at the higher education market. In an effort to expand the tools of higher learning, we publish texts, lab manuals, study guides, testing materials, software, and multimedia products.

At McGraw-Hill/Irwin (a division of McGraw-Hill Higher Education), we realize that technology has created and will continue to create new mediums for professors and students to use in managing resources and communicating information to one another. We strive to provide the most flexible and complete teaching and learning tools available, as well as offer solutions to the changing world of teaching and learning.

McGraw-Hill/Irwin is dedicated to providing the tools for today’s instructors and students to successfully navigate the world of Information Technology.

• Seminar Series—McGraw-Hill/Irwin’s Technology Connection seminar series offered across the country every year demonstrates the latest technology products and encourages collaboration among teaching professionals.

• McGraw-Hill/Osborne—This division of The McGraw-Hill Companies is known for its best-selling Internet titles, Harley Hahn’s Internet & Web Yellow Pages, and the Internet Complete Reference. For more information, visit Osborne at www.osborne.com.

• Digital Solutions—McGraw-Hill/Irwin is committed to publishing digital solutions. Taking your course online doesn’t have to be a solitary adventure, nor does it have to be a difficult one. We offer several solutions that will allow you to enjoy all the benefits of having your course material online.

• Packaging Options—For more information about our discount options, contact your local McGraw-Hill sales representative at 1-800-338-3987 or visit our Web site at www.mhhe.com/it.