690's Little Helper Project Specification

Overview:

Site for students of the University of Maryland LBSC 690 to provide additional learning resources on topics covered in class. It will be hosted by Geocities.com.

Functionality:

The primary target group for this web site will be current students of LBSC 690, though individuals outside the class or outside the University may also use the site to broaden their knowledge of the selected topics. It is not intended to replace the GA's course-specific help pages, nor is it meant to provide immediate help with homework problems. The main focus of this site will be to satisfy the general information needs of students, who may be looking for additional learning resources for the homework and lecture topics covered in class.

Our site will provide brief summaries of several of the main topics taught in the class, and it will guide browsers to resources covering these topics, linking to external tutorials and articles. It will annotate and rank these links according to their depth and apparent difficulty level (i.e., basic, moderate, advanced). Some links to online bookstores will also be provided, and selected titles of books relating to the topics will be listed.

Linked sites may include, but are not limited to, Amazon.com, Fatbrain.com, Borders.com, MSDN.Microsoft.com.

Structure and Content:

The site will consist of a main introductory page with links to the current syllabus, class web site, GA and professor web sites, and other official UMD resources. Subsequent pages will focus on specific topics.

The topics were chosen according to the following criteria:

• Was this a topic covered by LBSC 690 in Summer 2000?
• Had this topic been covered in lecture prior to the submission of the Project Specification, on Aug. 14, 2000?
• Would there be online resources of sufficient depth and interest for this topic?
• How many topics could our group cover sufficiently in the time allotted for this project, and how best could those topics be grouped and distributed among the group?

Pursuant to the above criteria, this web site will feature the following topics:

• Hardware
• Networking
• Databases
• Spreadsheets
• UNIX
• HTML
• Multimedia
• JavaScript
• XML
• SMIL

Each page will briefly describe the topic at hand, as well as provide links to online tutorials of varying degrees of difficulty, online articles regarding and expanding on the topic, and recommended texts for further reading. The degree-of-difficulty determination and reading recommendations made on this site will be based purely on the subjective opinions and experience of the site designers.

Maintenance:

Each semester the site will be updated by a member of our team to display the current syllabus and topics being discussed in class. At the time of update, the links will be tested and new links to new resources will be added.

Environment:

This web site will function within the environments of Internet Explorer and Internet Explorer for Macintosh (5.0 and up), as well as in Netscape (4.0 and up) for both Mac and PC platforms.