What’s the Internet?

On Tuesday evening the Internet Course continued to blow minds and win hearts with another brilliant group presentation by Jack Eaton, Jack Hylan, James Roepe, and Will Strand. This group presented on the history of ARPANET, and let me tell you they were presentation ringers. They were throwing Jolly Ranchers to anyone who participated and seducing the class to pay attention with a $12 Chipotle gift card to the person who scored 100% on a quiz they gave.

But it wasn’t all about bribing the class to participate with sweets and burritos—-though that was remarkably effective. They also did a brilliant job presenting their topic. They created a compelling timeline of the history of the internet using TimelineJS.

Even better, they produced a video for the session wherein they asked random folks on UMW’s campus three simple questions in the following order: What is the internet? What is the world wide web? What is ARPANET?

The resulting video (featured below) is probably the most compelling argument yet for building out a more robust notion of web literacy into the curriculum. I highly recommend you spend five minutes watching the video they produced. It’s a telling document about how few students understand not only the history of the internet (à la ARPANET) but how the basics of how the internet work.

The Internet Course: WINNING!

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