Web: History, Functionality, Use Cases
History
U.S. Defense Department's ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency) project. ARPA was a Pentagon agency that sought to design a network that could withstand partial destruction and still function. Academic computer scientists were hired to develop the network, which was launched in 1969 with four nodes, or sites.
By 1971, ARPANET had expanded to 23 sites
By 1980, ARPANET had expanded to more than 200 sites. Local area networks began to proliferate in universities, businesses, and corporations.
Tim Berners-Lee, working on a NeXT computer for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), developed the first Web browser called WorldWideWeb. The name of this browser has become synonymous with the Web as a whole. Berners-Lee finished the browser on Christmas day in 1990. He developed a standard file format called HTML that consisted of plain text marked up with special tags to tell a web browser how to display the content.
In February of 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina from NCSA released Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, to the public for free. Mosaic ran on UNIX workstations running the X-Windows graphical shell. A few months later, a version was released for Macintosh computers. Mosaic included support for sound in Sun Microsystem's 8-bit AU format.
The Lynx hypertext browser developed at the University of Kansas is modified by student Lou Montulli in March of 1993 to allow it to display documents found on the Internet. Lynx becomes the preferred software for text-only Web browsing and it is still used today.
Benefits of social networking on Teachers
Social networking benefits not only students but also provides new opportunities for communication amongst teachers and educators. According to a report featured in The Journal of Educational Technology Systems : " Tech savvy administrators are using blogs as a tool to keep parents, teachers, and students informed of the things going on in their schools".