Lecture 5, the Web – CSS

This is the second of 3 lectures looking at the web and how it fits into our world.  Last week we looked at HTML,  this week we are looking at Cascading Style Sheets or CSS.   CSS is becoming increasingly important in the development of web pages but can be hard to get your head around at first.  CSS is a major element in achieving the outcome of separating the content from the displaying of the content.

Lecture 4, the Web – HTML

This is the first of 3 lectures looking at the Web and how it fits into our world.   We are starting off by looking at HTML as it is an important technology to understand and be familiar with for an IT professional. It is increasingly being used everywhere.  The ability to write,  manipulate and understand html and it’s philosophy is greatly beneficial.

Lecture 3, Operating Systems – Process Management

In our previous lecture we looked at how information is stored in a computer system.  This week we are going to finish off our look at operating systems by investigating how information is managed when it is being processed.  This is an area of much interest at the moment as we move into an environment where multiple cores and multiple CPU’s are increasingly common.  This is introducing a whole range of new problems and complexities that we haven’t fully solved yet.  The next few years are going to produce some very exciting new developments.

Lecture2, Operating Systems – the File System

In our first lecture we looked at the user interface.  We looked at how users go about entering data into,  and retrieving data from a computer system.  This data has to be stored somewhere,  however,  so in this lecture we followed on to look at how file systems work.  While an end user doesn’t usually need to concern themselves with the particulars of the file system their computer is using,  an IT professional should. An understanding of how filesystems work can be important to developing software that works efficiently,  it can also help sometimes in terms of troubleshooting.  Even if you don’t use it for any of these,  having a good understanding is still beneficial from a mindset point of view.

Lecture 1, Operating Systems – User Interfaces

In our first lecture we started off by looking at user interfaces.  This is a nice place to start as it is the first and main part of a computer users experience. It is also one that users tend to put remarkable little thought into in general.  It is a part that ICT professionals should be very familiar with if they are going to successfully help people to get the most out of their technology.

My experiences as an academic

I’ve recently created a category for Uni.  Here I intend to put thoughts regarding some of the material we are teaching in the subjects I have at UTS.  Like any other subject we have a limited amount of time in which to teach,  yet a whole wealth of material that we could cover.  Often times we miss out on being able to cover some really interesting and thought provoking topics.  So I thought I would discuss some of them here.

If you are a student in one of my subjects I hope reading these will give you interesting perspectives.  If you are a past student of the subjects then  I hope you find these illuminating.  If you are just a passer by then I encourage you still to read them as they don’t directly refer to any of our subject material so you should still find them interesting.  I also encourage you to post any comments you have,  collaboration makes the world a better place.