This image illustrates a message being broken apart into smaller packets of data. These pieces of data take random routes from one device to another as the message is sent and received. Once all packets have arrived at the recipient's device, they're reassembled.
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You're seeing this because you're a teacher 🤓
🎯 Your main goal for this lesson
It sounds obvious, but helps students to understand the internet hasn't always been around. Digital natives have it in their head that we're all old and run around using rotary phones.
🧠 Things to keep in mind when teaching
While this lesson is far from having a development or design focus, it's important as an academic component for students to understand the internet is a system built by people. This lesson, while historic in nature, sets the foundation for the course going forward.
🚀 Lesson Plan
Activity One: 20 minutes
Start class by asking the question, “What do you use the internet for every day?” Give students a minute to process this by themselves; encourage them to enumerate different apps, services, and sites they commonly visit. Ask them to share items from their list with the class. As they share, aggregate the list on the board for the entire class.
Next, ask students to work with a partner or in small groups to take the compiled list and break it into different categories. As they create their categories, they should then sort the different items in the list into the appropriate category.
Have each pair or group share; note the similarities and differences between categories and students’ rhetoric. Guide the discussion and set the stage for the body of the lesson which will focus on the impetus for the internet and the very different shape it takes in the modern day.
Activity Two: 30 minutes
The throughline of this lesson is focused on connection. Have students, in small groups or with a partner, develop a presentation on a piece of technology they use every day (it can be their phone, tablet, an IoT device, a specific app) and have them explain its relationship to the internet and it's role in encouraging human connections. Depending on the size and age of the class, students should spend 15-20 minutes developing their presentations and ten minutes presenting as a whole class.
Activity Three: 10 minutes
Take the formative assessment at the end of class. Work towards mastery.
How does the internet work?
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to...
- Identify key terms related to the history of the internet.
- Identify what a network is.
- Arrange the events in the evolution of the internet in the correct order.
- Analyze devices to see if they are a part of the internet.
Why the Internet?
Ask yourself, "Why does the internet exist?" Your initial answer may have something to do with ecommerce, social media, or online news sources. The underlying theme that connects all of these different uses of the internet is human connection. Our social nature as a species and need to communicate with one another has spurred invention and new forms of technology for centuries.
While the first reasons for creating a worldwide network of computers may have been motivated by a specific, niche group of users, it's undeniable that people in the modern day use the internet for everything. Arguably, the heart of that use is still the need for connection and community that remains so important.
In this first lesson we'll explore the conditions that created the internet and its different incarnations through the modern day.
Born of Defense
ARPANET
Historical perspective is important in helping us to understand why things happened the way they did. The internet was born during a period of global unrest known as the Cold War. During the Cold War, much of the funding of university research projects came from the United States government. Specifically, many of these grants came from the Department of Defense (DoD). The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first attempt at bridging multiple networks around the United States into a single, interconnected entity. The US government sought to stay ahead of any Soviet advances; they saw increasing the availability and speed by which knowledge could be shared between research institutions as a vital piece of defeating their foes. Additionally, as we'll soon see, the DoD was seeking a way of decentralizing communications structures in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. The military needed a way to ensure that its communication network couldn't be taken down by a single strategic strike.
Connecting on a Network
In 1969, when ARPANET was first successfully tested, there was no existing mechanism for two computers to share information via connecting to each other. Data could physically be transferred from one device to another, but it had to be done manually. To connect these devices would be what was referred to as a local area network (LAN)To meet the stated goals of the DoD, and increase the speed/reach that networks had, there was a desire to use existing telecommunications infrastructure to enable multiple computers - or nodes - on a network to communicate when separated by great distances.
To solve this problem, researchers developed a system of breaking down information sent by one computer to another into a smaller portion called a packet. Packets are still used in the modern day and enable for the quick transfer of data from one computer to another. Packets take random routes from computer to computer and don't always arrive in the sequential order they were sent. When they arrive at the destination, information contained in the header of the packet allows it to be identified and the larger piece of data reassembled.
This image illustrates a message being broken apart into smaller packets of data. These pieces of data take random routes from one device to another as the message is sent and received. Once all packets have arrived at the recipient's device, they're reassembled.
These random routes met the needs of the DoD and helped to ensure that a nationwide communications network could continue working even if one or several sites were damaged by a nuclear strike. Further, this decentralized method of packet switching is what the entire foundation of internet traffic is built on today!
Who is Who?
As the size of these networks grew, and with the eventual interconnectedness to other networks, there was a need for these devices to understand which nodes were on the network and what information was intended for what user. In the 1970's, researchers developed the Ether model of networking which eventually went on to be called ethernet. If you have a computer hard-wired into a network today, it's probably still using ethernet cables!
Whether transferring information via ethernet cables, or using wifi to transmit data over the air, computers utilize specific addresses to know which packets belong to whom and which packets are intended for which computers. This address is called a MAC address and every computer has its own unique 12-digit long hexadecimal string.
Our next lesson will focus on the development of the different protocols that govern traffic on the internet.
The World Wide Web
Not the Internet
It's important to understand that the world wide web (web) is not the internet. In reality, the web runs as an application - accessed via your browser - on the internet. The web uses the internet's infrastructure (the same basic infrastructure dating back to ARPANET!) to run.
The web was invented in 1989 by an English scientist named Tim Berners-Lee. He worked at European research laboratory called CERN. CERN and other research institutions had a need for sharing information - not too dissimilar from ARPANET during the Cold War - that was more accessible and easier to navigate than utilizing the computers' file directories. Berners-Lee utilized a system of clickable text that could link to other resources; this is still used today and is known as hypertext. While Berners-Lee utilized this idea in his web of information, he was not the inventor of hypertext. Hypertext was first proposed in the 1940s(!) by a scientist named Vannevar Bush via a machine called a memex.
Berners-Lee imagined a system in which there were two types of devices: clients and servers. We'll learn more about these in our next lesson, but this relationship is the foundation of all internet traffic in the modern day: your computer or phone acts as a client using a browser; that browser requests information from servers that deliver you with webpages, YouTube videos, streaming music, etc.
By the late 1990's, the web had taken hold. The availability of computers grew; companies you now know as household names (like Amazon and Google) were in their infancy; the first dotcom bubble was about to happen. The growth of the web at the end of the twentieth century was unprecedented and foreshadowed the large-scale saturation of devices we see in the modern day.
Modern Day
Smart Phones
As of 2021, we've undoubtedly entered a new era of the internet. Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, high speed internet connections grew in availability and affordability. In 2005, Facebook's widespread adoption ushered in a wave of new internet users who - for the first time - were able to author content on the web. With the advent of the iPhone in 2007, the "smart phone" was introduced to the world and thus the exponential increase in consumption and creation of content continued.
The addition of these new devices - like phones and tablets - that had true internet capabilities provided users with amazing opportunities. Whole ecosystems of applications were developed and the term 'app' entered the modern lexicon to replace 'programs', 'applets', 'applications', and 'daemons'. All of this, though, built on the foundation of the internet: the request and response of information from device to device; from person to person.
The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (or IoT as it's become known) is the proliferation of 'smart' devices that - in the past - typically would not have had internet capabilities. these devices can connect to a LAN and - eventually - to the internet. IoT devices give users remote control over devices: Turn a light switch off in Jakarta from California? Sure. Turn the oven on as you leave work so you get home so it's preheated for dinner? No problem. Turn the thermostat down to save energy as soon as you leave the house and your phone disconnects from the wifi? Easy.
IoT devices have helped us realize the potential of automating many of our tasks. It's no surprise they've even been given human features (names like 'Siri' or 'Alexa'). Not unlike the first uses of the internet, they've aided in encouraging us to create connection.