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ABSTRACT
The advent of the World Wide Web not only fundamentally changes the way we do things, it also greatly changes how computer software are built. While this profound evolution of software development has caused many in the software industry to change their way of developing software, it has not caused many in the academics to change their way of teaching computing. This paper describes the evolution of a course that teaches web development technologies. The contents of the course in three different iterations, the observations made, the available educational resources employed, and the challenges ahead for the course are presented.
Keywords: Web Development Technologies, Pedagogical Pattern, Web Development Resources
1. INTRODUCTION
The field of information technology has experienced its shares of changes and evolution in the past few decades when compared to other disciplines. But none of the changes and evolutions in recent years is as profound as the introduction of the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1992 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, Switzerland.
In fact, to get a sense of the potential impact of the web on our society, consider Figure 1 given below [1]. The figure shows the web as it is compared to the inventions of electricity, radio, television, and telephone from 1900 to year 2000 (X-axis). As shown, the various ubiquitous household "technologies" have almost reached their full capacities (Y-axis) where as the potential for the web in only beginning to be explored. Needless to say, the growth of the web today is not as wild as during the heyday of the Internet explosion where millions of web pages were being created daily. Still, the web has been growing steadily. This is evident from many studies including a recent report from the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) where it is reported that web access jumped 158% in 2000 as compared to the year before and that 7.1 million homes and businesses had highspeed (i.e., DSL, cable modem, satellite, and wireless) web access (CNNFn, `01).
Noting this explosive growth potential of the web, many businesses have already transformed their business models to adapt to and exploit this new world of opportunities. This includes reexamination of their business processes, system development architecture, personnel (re)training, etc. For the academics, information systems...