WWW: Beyond the Basics

Preface

The evolution of the World Wide Web has reached a stage where it is very easy for a user or an application developer to get lost in the day to day developments, rather than concentrating on the more fundamental issues. New techniques and standards are being proposed every other day, which leads to a very nebulous view of existing WWW technology. There was a dire need for an information resource that structures the various facets of existing WWW technology into a comprehensible whole and also breaks it up into fundamental divisions. This book is an attempt to satisfy this need and much more. It is a product of a graduate level Computer Science course, "World Wide Web: Beyond the Basics", which was taught by Dr. Marc Abrams at Virginia Tech in Fall '96.

The material in the book caters to a dual audience: novice users of the WWW, who want a fundamental knowledge about existing and evolving Web technology, and professional users, who want in-depth infomation on specific topics. It tries to address 6 major issues surrounding the Web today:

Having the class write an online book about the course is a very novel approach to teaching. There were pedagogical and practical purposes for this. Dr. Abrams wanted to get away from traditional teaching methods and employ a constructivist approach in which students together construct the knowledge about a subject and the teacher serves as a guide. The students learned by discovering information, writing about it, and critiquing each other's work.

A single person could not know enough about the Web to teach a comprehensive course on it in only one semester. So, it was logical to break down the task into more manageable chunks. Each student in the class was required to write one chapter for the book after researching on his/her assigned or chosen topic, and present it to the class. Thus, more was learned from the chapter presentations than could have been possible if Dr. Abrams had himself presented the material.

Students also served additional roles in the preparation of the book as a whole. Each student was required to review two other articles and also served as a member of one of the functional committees, such as the editorial board, the style board, and others. The Virginia Tech Computer Science department has been looking for ways to incorporate large scale teamwork in the curriculum, since employers are interested in people trained to work in a team. Dr. Abrams got the idea of having the class write a book from Ben Shneiderman, a professor at the University of Maryland, who had described in a lecture at Virginia Tech, a course in which his students wrote two online works: " The Encyclopedia of Virtual Environments" and "The Journal of Virtual Environments" (http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/hcil/vrtp.html).

There are many different voices and viewpoints in this book. Each student has learned about one particular topic in great detail, and is now aware of the hard work required to produce a quality piece of technical literature. The book has been a valuable learning experience for the class, and we hope that others interested in the World Wide Web, and group learning, will find it valuable, too.

- The Editorial Board.

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Last modified: Wed Dec 11 17:00:00 1996