Summary

This report describes a series of computer training classes for Parkside residents, to be held at the Parkside Community Center. The classes will be taught by volunteer instructors from Oak Branch Community College.

Background

Computer training classes for Parkside residents was first suggested by Jeremy Conklin, a five-year veteran of the Parkside Board of Directors and now Dean of Students at Oak Branch Community College. Jeremy recruited four volunteer instructors, who have agreed to teach approximately a month of classes each. Jeremy has also agreed to oversee the class series and will create the course syllabus. Our goal is to focus on basic computer literacy, word processing, spreadsheets, the Internet, and simple databases.

Instructors

Oak Branch Community College is a two-year vocational institution specializing in technology-related fields, offering associate degrees in fields like computer programming, network engineering, and Web design. Members of the Oak Branch faculty have won countless teaching awards, and the school as a whole was last year’s winner of the Midwest Higher Learning Award of Excellence. Over 50% of Oak Branch students continue on to four-year institutions to complete bachelor degrees.

The class instructors and their professional specialties are as follows:

[instructor names]

Equipment Needs

The classes will be held in the reading room at the Parkside community center. We can accommodate a total of 27 students. Ideally we would have one computer for each student, but that is beyond our means. One computer for every three students is more realistic.

There are currently five desktop computers available for public use at the center, although all five require updated operating systems. We need four more computers to achieve our goal of one computer per three students. One of the instructors, Pedro Morales, has offered to repair and upgrade the five computers we currently own for free. He also has offered to run a donation drive in coordination with the City of Evanston computer recycling program. He is confident that we will have all the computers we need by the time the first class starts.

Schedule

Classes will run from January through May, every Tuesday at 7 PM. We don’t yet have a detailed syllabus, but the first topic that will be covered is on Internet Basics. Below is a preview of the first class.

Internet Basics The Internet is a network of networks. Internet stands for “Internetworked networks”. Computer networks were around long before the Internet came into existence. The first computer networks were geographically close to one another, often within a single building. Called local area networks (LANS), these networks are used by large companies for in-house data processing. Universities use LANs for administrative, educational, and research purposes. Some libraries use LANs to hold their card catalogs. In time, university research LANs and commercial research LANs began to create communication links so that computers in different LANs could share information. Then government networks and corporate networks joined the mix. Eventually, commercial networks were created for the sole purpose of giving consumers access to this rapidly expanding infrastructure, this network of networks and its associated computer-based communications. The Internet now reaches into more than 211 countries, connects more than 300 million computer hosts, and is used by over880 million people worldwide.

IP Address

Each computer on the Internet is called an Internet host or a host machine. Each host machine has a special address called the Internet Protocol (IP) address that identifies that host uniquely. Although IP addresses are fine for computer communications, most people can’t easily remember long strings of numbers. The text version of an IP address is called the DNS or the Domain Name Service address. For example, 66.218.71.63 is the IP address for yahoo.com.

World Wide Web (www)

The World Wide Web is the star attraction n the Internet. It has made the Internet widely accessible to millions of people. Many people think that the Web is the same thing as the Internet. This is not true, although the confusion is understandable. The Web is just one of the many communications protocols that use the Internet. The Web is actually relative newcomer to the Internet. The Web consists of hypertext interspersed with multimedia elements such as graphics, sound clips, and video clips. Hypertext is a dynamic variation on traditional text that makes it easy to digress and view related documents as you wish. A hypertext document contains pointers to other hypertext documents, called hyperlinks or links that you click with your mouse.