Description and Rationale

The Internet has come of age during 1990s. It is vital therefore that the information Systems practitioner should be aware of the implications of this for the world of information. This module looks at the most important of these implications by dealing with the technical and organisational issues that arise out of the development and the use of the Internet and Intranets.

Module Aims & Objective

The module aims are: ·        This module aims to prepare the information Systems professional to use the Internet effectively and to understand the implications of its rapid adoption and that of its offshoots, Intranets and Extranets, bring ·        To introduce the student to the major tools and techniques for developing web pages and sites. ·        To involve the students in a web design team, encouraging practical experience of the technical and management challenges when completing a business web presence. ·        To encourage the students to speculate upon the future of this form of distributed computing

Learning Outcome

On completing this module the student should: ·        understand the extent of the technological change by the widespread acceptance of the Internet and its extensions: Internets. ·        appreciate the implications for the users and producers of information systems that these changes imply. ·        understand the major technologies that make the Internet such a powerful system. ·        be able to keep up to date with developments in this technology by following the literature in the technical press as well as the major online information sources.

Learning Strategies

Learning will be in formal lectures, tutorials / seminars and practicals. The lectures will be used to introduce the techniques to the students whilst the seminars used to student's abilities to use the techniques to solve problems

Assessment Information

All students registered on this module will receive an invitation, via e-mail, to join this discussion workspace. The students must reply to the invitation and register at the site to establish a user id and password. Participation in this forum is compulsory and will be marks as part of Assessment 1(see below) ·        Assessment 1 Assessment 1 will be a team project consisting of the development, documentation, and demonstration of a web site, which conforms to the requirements and scenario, detailed in the separately issued Assessment 1 guidance. Development Teams will consists of 5 students menders established in the first two weeks of the semester. Evidence of team working through the use of discussion forum will also be part of this assessment. Though this assessment is completed through group work, it is expected that every student be knowledgeable in all material covered in the module. This assessment is worth 60% of the module grade, will be issued during the week 5 lecture, and is due at start of week 11. ·        Assessment 2 Assessment 2 will be a centrally invigilated computerised examination worth 40% of the module grade.

Reading

Due the dynamic nature of the Internet / WWW, no single source texts are currently available which incorporate all the subject areas in this module. However those highly recommend below covers the majority of the module topics. In addition the lecture notes, additional references and web sites will be noted during the semester. 1. Internet & World Wide Web: How to Program (Available in the CAS Library) Deitel, H, M. Prentice - Hall 2.  Web Programming, Building Internet Applications Bates, Chris (2000) Wiley 3.  Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites Yale University Press (1999) Complete guide on-line at: http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/ 4.  Designing Web Usability (Available in the CAS Library) Jakob Nielsen http://www.useit.com New Riders 5.  HTML 4.01 specification - official W3C Recommendation, Revised 24 December 199 (downloadable for offline use in many compressed formats) http://www.w3.org/TR/html4 6.  Extensible Mark-up Language W3C Recommendation (Latest Version) http://www.w3.org/TR/Rec-xml