Internet Primer
From BlueOxen
Possibly perform this in Pecha Kucha format or something similar. Definitely should be no longer than 30 minutes, 10 or less in an ideal world.
Contents |
Computers
Show laptop, musical greeting card, watch, Cardboard Computer. Which of these are computers? Trick question -- they all are. The person who gets this right gets to answer the next question, which is...
What is a computer? Anything that can solve computable problems. If this sounds like a bunch of academic hubbabaloo, yeah, you're probably right. Except that computer scientists have spent their careers trying to figure out which problems are computable, and which are not.
What's a computable problem? Any problem that can be solved by a Turing Machine.
The key takeaway here is that computers are fundamentally dumb. But they're also incredibly fast. A device that can only manipulate ones and zeros is a very boring thing... unless it can manipulate billions of these every second. Scale Is A Big Deal (a theme that will run throughout).
Internet
What if we had a bunch of computers all over the world? What if they were all connected somehow? How could we get information from one computer to another?
For starters, we need to know how to identify a computer. We need an address. Every computer on the Internet has a unique numerical address. Some of them have unique alphabetical names. These are the addresses most of you are familiar with -- www.leadershiplearning.org for example. When I tell my computer to contact that machine, it knows where to go.
In addition to knowing where to go, you have to speak the same language. You know that "http" in front of URLs? That tells the computer to contact the other computer using the language of the web (i.e. "HyperText Transfer Protocol"). When we use email, we speak a different language than http. (SMTP, or "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol" for the curious.)
We don't need to know exactly what these languages (or protocols) look like, but we can probably figure out the basics. Let's walk through email.
The Web
You do not install Google. You cannot break the Internet.
Explanation goes here, including web apps explanation.
None of this is as transparent as it should be. If you thought that you had to install Google on your computer, don't feel bad. It's the tool builder's fault. They thought it was a good idea to make things seem as integrated as possible without considering the consequences. There are armies of engineers trying to sort through the consequences of all this.
You are not wrong. You are never wrong. Mom and double-clicking. The architect and saving.
