Fluency with IT: Skills, Concepts, & Capabilities

The Fluency with IT: Skills, Concepts, and Capabilities course is targeted at students who are already familiar with computers, the Internet, and the World Wide Web and have a deeper understanding of the broad capabilities of technology.

The computer fluency course covers topics such as information technology, human-computer interfaces, networking fundamentals, information location on the world wide web, and more. This course teaches computer skills and provides complete coverage of all concepts required for information technology.

Lesson 1: Defining Information Technology

• Computation's Greatest Hits

• Terms of Endearment

• Computers, Software, and Algorithms

• The Words for Ideas

• Summary

• Short Answers

• Exercises

Lesson 2: Exploring the Human-Computer Interface

• A Few Useful Concepts

• Perfect Reproduction

• What We See and What We Think

• Summary

• Short Answers

• Exercises

Lessons 3: The Basics of Networking

• Comparing Communication Types

• The Medium of the Message

• The World Wide Web

• File Structure

• Summary

• Short Answers

• Exercises

Lesson 4: A Hypertext Markup Language Primer

• Marking Up with HTML

• Lab Practice I

• Structuring Documents

• Lab Practice II

• Get Into Style with CSS

• Marking Links and Images

• Referring to Files

• Span, Lists, Tables, and Boxes

• Cascading Style Sheets

• Styling with Class

• Hovering Above Links

• HTML Wrap–Up

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises

Lesson 5: Locating Information on the WWW

• Web Search Fundamentals

• Advanced Searches

• Web Searching

• Authoritative Information

• Truth or fiction?

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises

Lessons 6: An Introduction to Debugging

• Precision: The High Standards of Computing

• Debugging: What's the Problem?

• A Dialog About Debugging

• Debugging Recap

• Fixing HTML Bugs: A Case Study

• No Printer Output: A Classic Scenario

• Ensuring the Reliability of Software

• Community Debugging

• Summary

• Short Answers

• Exercises

Lessons 7: Representing Information Digitally

• Digitizing Discrete Information

• Information Representation

• Binary and Hex

• Digitizing Numbers in Binary

• Digitizing Text

• UTF-8

• The Metadata and the OED

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises

Lessons 8: Representing Multimedia Digitally

• Digitizing Color

• Computing on Representations

• Digitizing Sound

• Digital Images and Video

• Optical Character Recognition

• Multimedia Challenges

• Bits Are It

• Summary

• Short Answers

• Exercises

Lessons 9: Principles of Computer Operations

• There's an App for That

• Software Isn't So Hard

• Instruction Execution Engine

• The Program Counter: The PC's PC

• Instruction Execution

• Translation

• Integrated Circuits

• How Semiconductor Technology Works

• Combining the Ideas

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises

Lessons 10: Algorithmic Thinking

• Algorithms

• Algorithms—A Basic Concept

• A Closer Look

• Doing the Right Thing

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises

Lessons 11: Social Implications of IT

• The Power of the Crowd

• Out on Good Behavior

• Expect the Unexpected

• Creating Good Passwords

• Spam

• Scams

• Protecting Intellectual Property

• Creative Commons

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises

Lessons 12: Privacy and Digital Security

• Privacy and Technology

• A Privacy Definition

• Enjoying the Benefits of Privacy

• Fair Information Practices

• Is There No Privacy?

• Tracking

• Cookies

• Digital Security

• Prevention

• Encryption

• Redundancy Is Very, Very, Very Good

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises

Lessons 13: The Basics of Spreadsheets

• Arranging Information

• Computing with Spreadsheets

• Daily Spreadsheets

• Importing Data

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercise

Lessons 14: Advanced Spreadsheets for Planning

• Designing a Spreadsheet

• Conditional Formatting

• Conditional Formulas

• Naming: Symbolic Reference

• What-If Analysis

• Analyzing Data Using Filtering

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises

Lesson 15: Introduction to Database Concepts

• Differences Between Tables and Databases

• XML: A Language for Metadata Tags

• Tables and Entities

• The Science of Tables

• SQL: The Language of Databases

• Structure of a Database

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises

Lesson 16: A Case Study in Database Organization

• Thinking About a Personal Database

• A Preliminary Exercise

• The iDiary Database

• Using the iDiary Daily

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises

Lesson 17: Fundamental Concepts Expressed in JavaScript

• Overview: Programming Concepts

• Names, Values, and Variables

• Three Basic Data Types of JavaScript

• The Assignment Statement

• Lab Practice

• An Expression and Its Syntax

• A Conditional Statement

• The Espresso Program

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises

Lessons 18: A JavaScript Program

• Preliminaries

• Background for the UI

• Creating the Graphical User Interface

• Event-Based Programming

• Critiquing the Bean Counter

• Bean Counter Recap

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises

Lesson 19: Programming Functions

• Anatomy of a Function

• Forms and Functions

• Writing Functions, Using Functions

• Customizing Pages

• Making a Web-Based Phone App

• Social Functions

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises

Lesson 20: Iteration Principles

• Iteration: Play It Again, Sam

• JavaScript Rules for for Loops

• Experiments with Flipping Coins

• Indexing

• Arrays

• It's Magic

• The Busy Animation

• Not So Busy Animation

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises

Lessons 21: A Case Study in Algorithmic Problem Solving

• The Smooth Motion Application

• Planning Smooth Motion

• Build the Basic Web Page UI

• Animate the Grid

• The Best Laid Plans...

• Build Controls

• Sense the Keys

• Staircase Detection

• Assemble the overall design.

• Primp the Design

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises

Lesson 22: Limits to Computation

• Can computers think?

• Acting Intelligently?

• Watson

• Acting Creatively?

• The Universality Principle

• More Work, Slower Speed

• Are the best algorithms all fast?

• Summary

• Short Answer

• Exercises