Seminar Outline

UNDERSTANDING WEB 2.0:
LINKING AND LEARNING IN A NETWORKED ENVIRONMENT

The purpose of this session is to get beyond the hype and to provide participants with an advanced and detailed understanding of Web 2.0 technologies.

A computer programming background is not required. This session will give participants a no-nonsense outline of key concepts and terminology, with hands-on experience working with software and services, presented clearly in non-technical language.


DAY ONE: CLIENT SIDE

Participants will explore the full range of web 2.) applications from a client perspective, exploring and creating content on a wide variety of web sites and services.

The intent will be not online to provide participants with a strong understanding of current web technology, but to explore the underlying technologies and to develop a sense of what to expect in the future.

9:00 - 10:30 Introducing Web 2.0

• A quick tour – looking at Web 2.0 sites
• Basic principles and trends
• A look at major writings (Cluetrain, O'Reilly, Boyd, etc)
• Outline of Underlying Technologies – AJAX, JSON, Tagging
• Future directions and underlying trends

11:00 - 12:30 User-Generated Content

• Blogs and blogging software
• Using Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal
• About blogging, how to blog, uses of blogs
• Educational Blogging
• Blogs and marketing
• Citizen Journalism – some examples
• Blogging accessories - tagging, Technorati, folksonomies, blogrolls

1:30 - 3:00 Syndicated Media

• The idea of content syndication
• RSS and Atom – what are they?
• RSS readers – Google Reader, Bloglines, others
• Yahoo Pipes and customized syndication engines
• Related specifications: OPML, FOAF
• Social Networking Theory – Watt and Barabasi
• Social networks - Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, Facebook

3:30 - 5:00 Making Multimedia

• Essential multimedia formats – MP3 and beyond
• Podcasting and audio – iTunes, Audacity and beyond
• Photos and Photo Editing - Flickr, Picasa and the rest
• Video and YouTube – From MovieMaker to Premiere
• Flash content – Slideshare and other online creations
• Trends: citizen journalism, recommender networks, e-learning


DAY TWO: SERVER SIDE

In the second day, participants will look behind the scenes, accessing a live web server and trying some hands-on software installations and configurations.

The session will progress from essential concepts common to all web servers to systems and applications specific to Web 2.0 including the advanced scripting techniques used to create interactive web programs.


9:00 - 10:30 Basic Server architecture

• A quick intro to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python)
• GET and POST: How CGI scripts work
• Accessing Web Servers – FTP and SSH
• Confuguring Databases – MySQL and DBI
• Installing Web Software - WordPress on LAMP
• Configuration – templates, modules and plug-ins

11:00 - 12:30 Content Management Systems

• Basic concepts of Content management Systems
• The key scripting languages: Perl and PHP
• PHP in detail in major CMSs: Drupal, Joomla
• Perl and Perl modules - Slashcode, LiveJournal code

1:30 - 3:00 Data structures

• The relation between Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web – XML, Resource Description Format and scripting
• Creating syndicated content engines
• RSS and Atom again, from the inside
• Data transfer – REST (as compared to Web Services)
• Open APIs – the Blogger API, the Facebook API
• Mixing media: Mash-ups


3:30 - 5:00 Advanced scripting and frameworks

• Javascript fundamentals and dynamic scripting - DHTML
• The Document Object Model (DOM)
• Javascript, JSON, HTTP Request and AJAX
• Frameworks: Parrot, Ruby on Rails, etc
• Distributed systems – Jabber and other P2P applications
• Authentication and Identification: OpenID and YADIS