Each Section covers a third of the course material for the quarter. You will be quizzed on topics brought up in the reading and discussed in class. There will be a midterm exam at the end of each Section.
Section 1a (Week 1)
- Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace
- Alan Turing
- ENIAC and UNIVAC
- Vacuum Tubes vs. Transistors vs. Silicon Chips
- Servers, mainframes, and supercomputers
Section 1b (Week 2)
- Basic elements of a computer (many pages on this tutorial, but they’re worth going through if you’re unfamiliar with computer terminology)
-
Multi-core processors
-
Systems of numbering
- Converting decimal to binary
-
ASCII and Unicode
- How a computer processes information
Section 1c (Week 3)
- Non-QWERTY Keyboards
-
Capacitive and resistive touchscreens
-
Accelerometers
-
RFIDs
-
Eye tracking technology, the commercial perspective
-
Eye tracking technology, the privacy-rights perspective
-
Monitor types
-
Printer types
-
Speech synthesis
-
Hard Drives and SSDs
-
Haptic feedback
Section 2a (Week 4)
- How Software is made (short video)
- Alpha and Beta Testing
- Operating Systems
- MS-DOS
- Graphical User Interface (GUI)
- Beginner’s Guide to Ubuntu (a Linux distribution)
- Back up your data!
Section 2b (Week 5)
- Copyright length and Disney
- Sony vs Universal Studios
- Digital Rights Management (DRM)
- Fair Use
- Abandonware
- Netflix vs filesharing
- Jammie Thomas vs. Capitol Records
- Kindle’s Text to Speech : 2009 issue
- Kindle’s Text to Speech: 2016 compromise
- Aaron Swartz
- Fanfiction
Section 2c (Week 6)
- How Photoshop Changed the World
- Difference between Photoshop and Illustrator
- Vector vs. Raster Graphics
- Common Graphic File Formats
- Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVGs) for logos
- Data compression: Lossy vs. Lossless
- Comparison of common audio formats
- Still Skeptical of V.R. – Five Challenges for Virtual Reality – Video by Extra Credits
Section 3a (Week 7)
- Basic introduction to databases
- Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
- Data mining
- Mapping and Sharing the Consumer Genome
- The Birth of Google
- Sex offender databases
- Facial recognition and privacy
- The ACLU’s Mobile Justice – A video recording app that stores video remotely on protected servers
Section 3b (Week 8)
- Basic Networking Terminology
- Broadband Connections
- How Routers Work
- Voice Over IP (VOIP)
- Bluetooth Basics
- How Fiber Optics Work
- How to Stay Safe on Public Wireless Networks
- Communication Protocols
- Networking cables: Twisted pair, Coaxial, Fiber Optic
- DSL vs Cable
- Virtual Private Networking
Section 3c (Week 9)
- ARPANET – The First Internet
- How the DNS (Domain Name Service) Works
- List of Top Level Domains
- The History of Net Neutrality
- Telecommunications Monopoly
- RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
- Denial of Service Attacks (using recent October 2016 attack as example)
- Internet, Intranet, and Extranet
Section 3d (Week 10)
- Common Malware Types: Cybersecurity 101
- Spoofing and Phishing
- Biometrics will replace passwords, but it’s a bad idea
- Two-Factor Authentication
- Introduction to Encryption
- Hacking
- Keyloggers
- Recovering from Identity Theft (you won’t be tested on this, I just think you should know where to start)