My First Article (9/30/1997)

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One of the nice things about the internet is it is a new form of comunication. You can read what someone else had to say about a topic you are interested in, and if you are reading it on a newsgroup or mailing list or even plain e-mail, you can respond! This give and take of questions and answers is what defines the internet as a new form of comunity. What is diffrent about the internet is that the topic of discussion is usually pre-detirmined. No chatting about the weather unless the group is about weather. You can find a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) file for most groups which is Questions and Answers about the topic. Sometimes these groups also have a Web site you can look at, but most of the time you can find related material at personal web pages. Most people will include their web address as part of the signature file. If you take the time to look at peoples pages you can find either links to other pages that discuss the topic or even an in depth tutorial about the topic. Some pages or the FAQ will give recomended reading lists, which are books you can read if you want to futher explore the topic.

I try to do a lot of reading about the topics that interest me. I read web pages, newsgroups, mailing lists, FAQ's, books, etc. I often find myself going back to the same book are rereading it to get the great information that was contained within. I remember that back in school that a lot of people used highlighters to highlight important sentences or pasages. As I'm reading I wish someone would of already had highlighted the important pasages so that is all I would have to read. A good example from the real world might be cliff-notes. That's what I want my Web pages to be. Information that you Need or might Want to know, orginized in an outline type format. Some of these pages are the handouts I give in my class, I then will give a more in depth explanation as part of my teaching. So these pages are a place to put the diffrent tips, etc that I've found but in an abreveated form, so I can understand them, and maby even someone else can too. These pages are not ment to be an in depth discussion about the computer, word processing, spreadsheets, internet, web design ( HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DHTML) or any of the topics I cover. But more of an overview of what you need or want to know. Hopefully you can find something useful.