Module Description

Once modern digital computers were developed in the twentieth century, it became necessary to figure out how to get them to communicate with each other, and then how to build a usable information ecosystem atop the ever-expanding network of interconnected machines. This module introduces you to some basic concepts for understanding how these problems were solved, to the encoding languages emerging from these solutions that now stand at the heart of the digital ecosystem—HTML and CSS— and to remedies for inequities and injustices that continue to haunt that ecosystem.

Learning Outcomes

At the completion of this module you should

1. Understand the difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet
2. Have a critical perspective on the broad outlines of early web and internet history
3. Understand, at a very basic level, the architecture and protocols that make the web run
4. Be able to write basic web pages in HTML
5. Be able to style basic web pages with CSS