Computing & Information Literacy (C/IL 102)
Spring 2009
Dr. McCloskey

Syllabus

Information about Tests/Quizzes

• Final Exam: Tuesday, May 19, 10:15am.
  Section 4 (MW 1pm): St. Thomas 210
  Section 8 (MW 3pm): St. Thomas 211
  Study Guide
• Test #1: Monday, March 9, 2009. Study Guide   Answer Key (1pm)   Answer Key (3pm)

Homework

• HW #1 : Golf Scores Worksheet (due April 8)
• HW #2: Term Paper and Class Presentation (due May 4)

Lecture Notes

• Memory/Storage
• Description of Hypothetical Computer
• Notes on Software, especially Operating Systems
• Notes on the Internet
• Notes on Malware
• Data Representation/Encoding

Notes on Videorecordings

• Summary of videotape Machine That Changed the World: Giant Brains
• Summary of videotape Machine That Changed the World: Paperback Computer

Web Textbook

• Web Textbook main page

Links to interesting articles on computing

• Tutorials
  • Windows XP tutorial at helpwithpcs.com
  • Windows XP tutorial at teacherclick.com
  • Windows Vista tutorial at microsoft.com
• General
  • Overview of Computers (wikipedia)
  • How PC's Work (How Stuff Works)
• Memory/Storage
  • How Computer Memory Works
  • How Removable Storage Works
  • How Hard Disks Work
  • How CD's Work
  • How DVD's Work
• Representation of Data
  • How Bits and Bytes Work
  • How Boolean Logic Works
  • Numeral Systems
  • ASCII table and related links
  • David Eck's Data Representation Lab (Scroll down the page and click on the "Launch DataReps" button.)
  • Why are there so many image formats on the Web?
  • Why are my digital photograph files so huge ...?
  • How Analog and Digital Recordings Work
• Internet-related
  • A Brief History of the Internet (by Leiner, Cerf, Clark, Kahn, Kleinrock, ...)
  • How LAN (local area network) Switches Work
  • How Internet Infrastructure Works
  • How Routers Work
  • How Web Servers Work
  • How Web Pages Work (Concentrate on the first fifth or so of the document, which gives you a basic idea of how web pages are encoded in the HTML language; you need not memorize all the various HTML tags.)
  • How Domain Name Servers Work
  • How Internet Search Engines Work
• System Software
  • How BIOS Works
  • How Operating Systems Work
• Malicious Software (Malware)
  • Malware
  • Computer Viruses
  • How Computer Viruses Work

Experiment web page