Workshop 94 CVUT --- First Contacts with Internet

[Ales Cepek]

Vazeni pratele,

pro W94 jsem napsal prispevek, ve kterem povidam o tom, jak jsme u nas
na katedre zacali seznamovat studenty s Internetem. Protoze se jedna
o predmet, ktery stale jeste u nas nepatri mezi standardni, budu vdecny,
pokud se budu moci seznamit s Vasimi zkusenostmi a nazory v teto oblasti.

                                                    Ales Cepek


--------------------------------------------------------------------------


FIRST CONTACTS WITH INTERNET

Ales Cepek

CTU, Fac. of Civil Eng.,
Dept. of Mapping & Cartography
Thakurova 7, 166 29 Praha 6


About a year ago I peeped for the first time into the world of
computer networks. Within a couple of days I was able to enter the
Cyberspace. All dreams of mediaeval alchemists, fumbling on their way
to the philosophers' stone, are fading compared with the present
reality---a living ocean of information flowing through computer
networks all over the World lying at our fingertips and at our
service. My previous feelings, which were not in any case
exceptional, were intensified by the simple fact that I was born in a
country living its poor existence in a gloomy shadow of an iron
curtain. The civilized world had a period of about twenty years to
adopt the phenomenon of computer networks as an integral part of its
culture. Our universities joined the European Academic & Research
Network (EARN) towards the  end of 1990; our first link to Internet
was around February 1992.

Since my very first contacts with Internet I have been absolutely
sure that it is essential for our students to enable their access to
the network and to introduce them to the field of networking.
Therefore in the autumn of 1992 I included "Internet" within the
curriculum of a seminar entitled "Introduction to data processing".
During the following months, my main source of information concerning
Internet was a series of excellent courses held by the Educational
association Omicron at the Department of computers within the
Electrotechnical faculty. Soon it became clear to me that introducing
new endusers to Internet would cover (at least) one whole semester.
At the first meeting with my students in October, I could tell them
that the whole semester would be focused on Internet (this statement
was applauded). As for next year, it has been definitely  decided to
change the subject of the seminar to "Internet resources".

As the first run of any seminar is more or less experimental in
nature, I have set an upper limit on the number of students enrolling
to ten and I personally informed those students whom I  wanted to get
for my seminar (these are forming majority) about my plans.  Starting
from next year the seminar will be open paralelly in both semesters
and I am not intending to limit the number of students (saying this
I can just hope that we will manage to get a new server at our
department). In the future I can rely on the help of my colleagues
who are representing two extra students of the seminar today.

I started our seminar with a short description of the ten following
themes

    * e-mail (electronic mail)
    * mailing lists (e-mail conferences)
    * Gopher, Veronica, Jughead
    * FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
    * Archie
    * Telnet, Hytelnet
    * Whois, Netfind
    * Netnews (Usenet)
    * World-Wide Web (WWW)
    * electronic journals and libraries.

Each of the students was to choose one of these topics and to prepare
a lecture thereby being responsible for introducing his/her
colleagues into the topic. The sources of information which I could
supply my students  with were manuals, various texts obtained from the
network and tutorial hours, five days a week. During our introductory
meeting I briefly mentioned the history of Internet and explained the
functions of e-mail and some basic related terms (TCP/IP, IP address,
nameserv, ...). On our second session, which again focused on e-mail,
the lecture was read by the first of the students; in fact we were
only revising the first week. It was just a warm up round, for by
following session we were running at full speed. The lectures are
continuing still, and when all of the ten lectures are read I am going
guide the students practice of networking.

Since the discussed seminar is intended for endusers, I am putting
much stress on practical skill. We have learnt a lot from experiments
with one demonstrational mailing list demo-l at csearn.bitnet which was
set up for practical education of students and is maintained by
Mrs. Ingrid Ledererova (here I would like to thank her and other
colleagues from the Computer Center of the Czech Technical
University  for all they have done for our academic society). To make
active use of Internet resources it is necessary to master a certain
minimum knowledge enabling later selfeducation (anything you want to
know about Internet is there). One of steps on this way is the
ability to take an active part in interest conferences. The above
mentioned demo-l list is supplied with a standard bitnet  conference
archive. The more that students will use this in the future, the
higher the educational profit we may expect.

At this time (November 1993), the semester is not over yet.
Nevertheless I can say that the first course of my seminar has
surpassed all my expectations. Most of all I am satisfied  with the
active role of my students in the seminar. Today I can not say what
gave me the courage to initiate a seminar in which I only had an
advantage over my students that you could measure in weeks. I am
convinced that it is just a matter of time before networking becomes
a standard subject of education, as for example, programming is
nowadays. I would be happy to answer all comments and suggestions on
the given topics sent to my e-mail address cepek at aci.cvut.cz. If
anybody wants to hear the opinions of my students, please write to
demo-l at csearn.bitnet.