Notes on the Midterm Exam

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In Unit 5 of the course, we looked a bit at website design. Now you have the chance to apply some of what you have learned as you analyze a specific website as part of the midterm exam. You will complete the exam in the Canvas part of the course. There is no time limit.

I had mentioned previously that I'd like to talk a bit about the evolution of web-based materials, or the stages in the development of the web. This is my own break-down and may not exactly correspond with other schema.

The Development of the Web (the Generations)

1st generation (web 1.0) was just text. Here is an example of a simple page from my HIS 102 course. While simple, this was an extremely useful way to get a lot of textual materials on the web, and this was great for historians who could now access all kinds of primary sources. See for example, Paul Halsall's Internet History Sourcebooks Project or the Avalon Project, which are collections of textual materials. There were also scholars who wrote up their lectures and posted them online, such as Skip Knox at Boise State University.

2nd generation (web 1.5) was text with images. You'd be surprised how much of an impact an image can have, and, after all, the web is more than just a printed book of text, but some technology hurdles had to be ironed out before images could be used on a wide scale on the web. Most of my own web materials fit into this second generation heading. Here is a typical example.

3rd generation (web 1.75) saw the beginning of some elements of interactivity creep onto the web. There now appeared links to audio/video materials; search functions also became widespread. See, for example, my HIS 241 index page, which has a simple search option. Depending on a viewer's choices, he/she could select different content to view on the web.

So, to sum up so far, generations 1, 2 and 3 involved the largely passive viewing of web materials by a viewer who clicks on something and reads, listens or even watches.

4th generation brought the real onset of interactivity. This is typically called web 2.0. (You can check the wiki entry or the definitive article by Tim O'Reilly, What is Web 2.0.) With web 2.0 and the arrival of social media, such as blogs and wikis, and a whole host of sites with interactivity built in (usually in the form of the omnipresent "comment" feature), you had very popular sites appear such as YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook. The focus now shifted to not only creating web materials but to the online interaction with those materials.

5th generation (Maybe web 2.5) gets kind of tricky to define as to where it starts, but there is clearly something different between an early web 2.0 tool such as Wikipedia and something like Google Earth. This generation also involves online tools, such as the data visualization tool that we will use later in the course with Many Eyes, and the timeline tools that we will also cover later. There are also the crowd participation projects, such as Field Expedition Mongolia, which are large-scale user participation. I guess that we could call this generation an era of tools and apps (short for applications).

6th generation involves something called web 3.0. No one is really sure exactly what that is, or will be, but it is developing very fast, and I think that it somehow involves cloud computing and materials floating in the web that can be freely accessed and mashed up into all kinds of creations. But that mash up might not be taking place under human direction. (See why this gets tricky!) I'm thinking here in terms of the way that Amazon's cloud works when you store your music there. You don't actually store your music; Amazon links to someone else who has already stored the same song in the cloud. Here is one of many attempts to explain what web 3.0 will be (Cade Metz, "Web 3.0," PC Magazine, 10 April 2007, page 74). You can also see something of what web 3.0 will be in the idea of fluid grid layout (an HTML 5.0 concept being implemented in Adobe's Dreamweaver)--the coding of a web pages will sense the type of device displaying a web page and automatically adapt the page for optimum viewing on the specific device--so, in other words, a page will display differently on a smartphone, table or PC (without having the designer design differently for each device).