Media + Quiz

DUE Wednesday, Jan 25 – 3 points
(Thursday NOON deadline)

This week we are looking at many different kinds of websites and internet services.

  • Website (Wikipedia)
    This article at Wikipedia discusses what a website is and what kinds of websites exist.

  • Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web (TED)
    In this video, recorded four or five years ago, Kevin Kelly predicts how the internet would be changing over the next thirteen years or so. As you listen, be thinking about which of Kelly’s predictions have already come to pass and which you think will not come to pass.

  • Top 10 Consumer Web Products of 2011 (ReadWriteWeb)
    For the last few years, ReadWriteWeb has run a series recapping the previous year’s trends. Do you use any of these products on a regular basis? As you read, think about this list in terms of Kevin Kelly’s predictions for the web.

Once you have watched or listened to or read these materials, you will need to take a quiz of ten true-false questions. (These questions will be randomly selected from the questions below. You can retake the quiz up to five times. Don’t stress about getting 100% on these quizzes: if you get 80% or better, you will be ready to proceed to the next activity and I will give you full credit.)

All questions should be prefaced with an understood, “According to the author / speaker  …”:

  1. T/F? All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web.
  2. T/F? The application used to view websites is known as a “web crawler.”
  3. T/F? Before the introduction of HTTP, another protocol known as “hedgehog” was available for accessing files from servers.
  4. T/F? Microsoft makes the Apache web server software.
  5. T/F? Static websites are coded and stored on web servers primarily in HTML.
  6. T/F? Content for dynamic content websites is usually stored in a database.
  7. T/F? The form “Web site” (with a capital “W” and a space between the two words) has become the standard spelling.
  8. T/F? Wikipedia mentions Yahoo! Answers and Stack Overflow as Q&A sites.
  9. T/F? Wikipedia does not mention itself as an example of any of the website types listed.
  10. T/F? Wikipedia mentions the Webby Awards as a prominent organization honoring the world’s best websites.
  11. T/F? Ten years before Kevin Kelly’s video, people believed the web would be “TV but better.”
  12. T/F? Kevin Kelly thinks the best way to think about the web is as one billion tiny machines.
  13. T/F? “The web” is older than “the internet.”
  14. T/F? At the time of Kevin Kelly’s video, the web was using 5% of the world’s electricity.
  15. T/F? Kevin Kelly predicts the web will exceed humanity in processing power in the year 2013.
  16. T/F? Kevin Kelly predicts that every bit of data — spreadsheets, documents, music, etc. — will be part of the web.
  17. T/F? Kevin Kelly mentions the following acronyms in his discussion of the semantic web: PHP, SVG, and SASS.
  18. T/F? Kevin Kelly sees the “Internet of Things” coming in the next five years.
  19. T/F? ReadWriteWeb described Opera as the most important web browser in the world.
  20. T/F? 1Password uses Dropbox for syncing.
  21. T/F? Amazon’s Kindle Fire has its own new web browser called Amazon Satin.
  22. T/F? Instapaper’s basic function is to let users manage their to-do lists.
  23. T/F? Flipboard is a feed reader that presents your web content like a magazine.
  24. T/F? Siri, Apple’s voice search, is built on research into slowing global warming.

DUE Wednesday, Jan 25 – 3 points
(Thursday NOON deadline)