ITR 3 Introduction

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ITR 3 Introduction

• Thomas Krichel
• 2002-09-03

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About me

• Born 1965, in Völklingen (Germany)
• Studied economics and social sciences at the
  Universities of Toulouse, Paris, Exeter and
  Leiceister.
• PhD in theoretical macroeconomics
• Lecturer in Economics at the University of Surrey
  1993 and 2001
• Since 2001 assistant professor at the Palmer
  School

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Why

• During research assistantship period, (1990 to
  1993) I was constantly frustrated with difficult
  access to scientific literature.
• At the same time, I discovered easy access to
  freely downloadable software over the Internet.
• I decided to work towards downloadable scientific
  documents. This lead to my library career
  (eventually).

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Steps taken I

• 1993 founded the NetEc project at
  http//netec.mcc.ac.uk, later available at
  http//netec.ier.hit-u.ac.jp as well as at
  http//netec.wustl.edu.
• These are networking projects targetted to the
  economics community. The bulk is
• Information about working papers
• Downloadable working papers
• Journal articles were added later

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Steps taken II

• Set up RePEc, a digital library for economics
  research. Catalogs
• Research documents
• Collections of research documents
• Researchers themselves
• Organizations that are important to the research
  process
• Decentralized collection, model for the open
  archives initiative

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Steps taken III

• Co-founder of Open Archives Initiative
• Work on the Academic Metadata Format
• Current interests
• Collaborative gathering of academic databases
• Incentive mechanisms to provide free
  bibliographic data
• Social issues surrounding free online scholarship

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ITR3

• Homepage to be built at http//wotan.liu.edu/home/
  krichel/itr3p01a
• work plan to be decided upon today. I will first
  set out what has traditionally been covered.
• And of course I have some innovative ideas.

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Why study IT?

• Make better use of the tools
• Self-help when there a problems
• Reduce dependency on computer professionals
• Conceptual challenge
• Point and click is not sufficient
• Stepping stone to more advanced stages of
  information processing, e.g. programming

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Maurer (undated)

• Introduction
• Logic and numbering system
• Software
• Architecture (3)
• Video, Peripherals
• Dismantle PC
• Communication

• LAN, WAN, Internet
• Multimedia graphics
• Site visit, survey glossary
• Project presentations
• Final exam

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Hunter (1999)

• Introduction to class
• Overview of computers
• Bits and bytes
• Components
• Architecture (2)
• Data storage
• Storage media
• Memory
• Input devices
• Displays

• Printers
• Input/output
• Operating systems
• Multimedia
• Simulation and VR
• Laptops
• Communications
• Networks
• Internet (2)
• Issues ethics, privacy

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Thomas thinks

• Hardware vs software
• Emerging technologies such as XML
• Isolated PC vs networked PC
• Using PC as an individual tool vs provision of
  public services
• Learning from books vs learning by doing and/or
  from Internet sources.
• Closed source vs open source software

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Software teaching

• Teaching of proprietary software is bad.
• Teaching of free user-level software is bad.
• But that leaves the whole are of system
  administration in non-proprietary software
  environments.
• Installing free software is not trivial.
• Example how to run a web server

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The networked PC

• Teaching networks in this course is bad.
• But the computer really becomes interesting as an
  information rather than a data processing tool
  once it is networked.
• It is interesting to look at PCs in the way they
  handle networks. Unfortunately this is operating
  system dependent.

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Debian to the rescue

• Debian is a free operating system.
• It contains over 9000 packages. Each package is a
  software tool. Impossible to learn completely.
• Information about it is mainly on the Internet.
• It can use the linux kernel.
• It is difficult to install.
• It is easy to update.

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Debian installation to supplement traditional
course

• Students will learn more about system
  administration. This is more important than
  hardware. On a free operating system, we can
  justify covering it.
• Learning by doing gets across some important
  concepts used in the software.
• Linux and X11 can have a bad time working with
  hardware. Hardware knowledge can be applied
  there.

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Practical problems

• Computers are available.
• Network cards on these computers may be
  problematic.
• Debian initial installation is best done in a big
  chunk of time. Once the computers are up, they
  can be used over the network.
• If they are at school, we have a firewall and
  address problem.
• If they are at home, we have a address problem
  and need to know about home networking.
• Assignment could cover exploring the capabilities
  of particular software pieces.