My Fourth IS Lesson: CSS

On the fourth IS lesson, I acquired some basic knowledge on CSS. CSS is the abbreviation for Cascading Style Sheets. Basically, CSS is used to change the layouts of web pages. The layouts in the web pages can be changed to the same one at once using CSS. One example of a code in CSS is link href="style.css"rel="stylesheet"type="text/css". It changes the formatting and styling of the content and look of the whole web page. DOCTYPE in CSS means that each HTML document must begin with a document type declaration that declares which version of HTML the document adheres to. HTML 4.0 comes in three flavours, each with a different DOCTYPE. The websites that talk about in-depth CSS are http://www.w3schools.com/css/ and http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/html/doctype/html.

My Third IS Lesson: HTML

In the third IS lesson, I learnt about HTML tags such as title, body and br. I also learnt that the / in front of a word means to end it. The / is required because a function has to be ended. I also learnt about how to add an image, add a hyperlink, HTML file naming rules and alternative text. We only have to key in codes into the Notepad application to create a website. In order to understand HTML faster and better, I watched a video clip which teaches HTML in detail in less than 10 minutes! It helped me a lot in the learning of HTML. I hope to learn more about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in the upcoming lesson.

My Second IS Lesson: Forum Discussions

In the second IS lesson, Mr. Kent asked us to create an account at http://webnewmedia.ning.com/ and participate in forum discussions. Before we post our comments, we had to view videos in our respective forums. For my forum, I had to view videos on human-computer interaction(HCI) and web 2.0 technologies. I was stunned after viewing the video as I did not know that people can complete tasks simply by speaking to devices. We can opt for alternative routes when driving and change the soundtrack that we want to listen to by instructing the devices vocally! However, this technology makes people lazy and adapt to a sedentary lifestyle. They do not have to remember a single thing now because the HCI will remind them. The web 2.0 technologies help us make new and more friends via social networking website such as LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook. It enlarges our social circle and increase our chances of getting opportunities. However, it is prone to be hacked in. Thus I think that both HCI and web 2.0 technologies are both beneficial and detrimental to our social lives. I hope to be able to learn more new things on technology in the next IS lesson.

My First IS Lesson: The Internet & WWW

On the first Infocomm Studies lesson, Mr Kent taught us about some basic information that we need to know when using a computer, such as how the Internet works. Before we can gain access to the Internet, we have to select a broadband service provider, like Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. After this is completed, we can find the information that we need on the Internet via search engines. We only have to type in some keywords on the search engine and press Enter, then the links which have the information will be displayed in less than a second! We also learnt what short forms of certain Internet-related terms stand for. For example, URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and ISP stands for Internet Service Provider. Next, we also learnt what a domain name is. It is actually what we type in every time we want to go to a website. However, the computer can only read codes, but codes are replaced by alphabets, so when we go to a website, we just need to type in the URL, not the code 52.891.563.58(for example). It has saved us a lot of time. I really enjoyed my first Infocomm Studies lesson and I have acquired a lot of new knowledge about IT.