2.7.3 Archive sites These are websites which offer customers a facility for storing their files at a safe location. This guards against anything disastrous happening to the customer's computer and their losing valuable data. Often the files will be duplicated at a number of computers at different locations in order to guard against the possibility of one of the locations being affected by a natural disaster such as an earthquake, or a computer being affected by a catastrophic failure which results in its stored
3.5.1 Anonymous remailers An anonymous remailer is a website which enables you to send an email anonymously to some recipient. The main reason for this is to do with something known as spam. This term describes unsolicited email which tries to sell the recipient something. Throughout the internet you can 4.5 Structure and data A problem that is being increasingly experienced by internet companies is the fact that they have to interchange a large amount of data and that such data inherently lacks structure. For example, HTML has proved to be an enduring markup language for developing web pages; however, there are no facilities within the language, for example, to indicate whether an item of data, say a three-digit number, represents the price of a commodity or some hourly rate charged by a company employee. Th 4.4 The speed of development E-commerce consultants speak of a web year. This is the time which it takes to bring to implementation a conventional system that would normally take a calendar year to develop. Current estimates are that one calendar year is equivalent to seven web years. Nowhere is there more of an imperative for companies to develop products and services quickly, together with the computing infrastructure required to support them, than in e-commerce. In software engineering terms this has given rise to a n 4.3 Programming and abstraction In the early 1990s programming an application for the internet was a tough proposition. I remember that I once had an application which required a very simple form of communication with another application located at a remote computer. I used a technology known as Winsocks which required me to carry out some pretty arcane code development just to send a simple test message to another computer and to receive a reply from that computer. Java, when it appeared in 1996, enabled developers t Learning outcomes After studying this course, you should be able to: detail what is meant by the term ‘e-commerce’ examine some typical distributed applications detail some of the problems that are encountered when developing distributed applications describe briefly some of the technologies that are used to support distributed applications show how some of the technologies detailed in the course are used in concert to realise a typi Introduction This unit examines the type of system which is described by the umbrella term ‘e-commerce’. A number of typical application areas are examined including retailing using the internet, supply chain management and online auctions. The unit also looks at some of the underlying technologies used to implement e-commerce applications, for example web technology. The final part of the unit looks at some of the problems which are encountered when developing distributed e-commerce systems, for exam Conclusion Relational database systems underpin the majority of the managed data storage in computer systems. In this course we have considered database development as an instance of the waterfall model of the software development life cycle. We have seen that the same activities are required to develop and maintain databases that meet user requirements. 1.6.4 Supporting data management strategies Most of the development we've covered so far in this course has focused on meeting specific user requirements – that is, ensuring the right data are constrained correctly and made available to the right user processes. However, other questions must also be addressed in order to support a data management strategy: How frequently should data be backed-up? What auditing mechanisms are required? Which users will be permitted to perform which functions? Which database tools and user processes w 1.6.3 Supporting users and user processes Use of a database involves user processes (either application programs or database tools) which must be developed outside of the database development. In terms of the three-schema architecture we now need to address the development of the external schema. This will define the data accessible to each user process or group of user processes. In reality, most DBMSs, and SQL itself, do not have many facilities to support the explicit definition of the external schema. However, by using built-in q 1.6.2 Populating the database After a database has been created, there are two ways of populating the tables – either from existing data, or through the use of the user applications developed for the database. For some tables, there may be existing data from another database or data files. For example, in establishing a database for a hospital you would expect that there are already some records of all the staff that have to be included in the database. Data might also be bought in from an outside agency (address 1.4 Analysis Data analysis begins with the statement of data requirements and then produces a conceptual data model. The aim of analysis is to obtain a detailed description of the data that will suit user requirements so that both high and low level properties of data and their use are dealt with. These include properties such as the possible range of values that can be permitted for attributes such as, in the Open University example for instance, the course code, course title and credit points. 1.3 Requirements gathering Here we are concerned only with the requirements that relate specifically to the data. Establishing requirements involves consultation with, and agreement among, all the users as to what persistent data they want to store along with an agreement as to the meaning and interpretation of the data elements. The data administrator plays a key role in this process as they overview the business, legal and ethical issues within the organisation that impact on the data requirements. The data req 6.2.2 Database servers To be able to search a website like Lakeland's requires not only a web server but a database server. Like a web server, a database server is a computer that responds to requests from other computers. Its task is to find and extract data from a database. The web and database servers form part of a distributed system. This means that separate computers exchange data and information across a network (in this case the internet) to produce results for a user. For 5.2.1 Transforming the natural to the designed The artist Christine Martell lives in Oregon in the United States and works with beads and visual images. I asked her to describe how she makes use of a computer to create her visual images of flowers and trees. She writes of her work: I start by finding flowers that are compelling in some way, most often in form and colour. I take photographs with a 35 mm camera having a macro lens. I'm usually looking for a 5.1.2 The human genome All life is ‘encoded’ chemically in genes. What this means is that the structure of an organism, the organs it possesses, its colouring, and so on are all determined by different genes. A very simple organism may have just a few genes, and a complex one tens of thousands. The ‘map’ of an organism's genes is referred to as its genome. It shows, in essence, which genes give rise to which characteristics or traits of the organism. The word ‘template’ would describe the 5.1.1 What is DNA? DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is frequently in the news for four main reasons. DNA can be used in crime detection to eliminate innocent suspects from enquiries or, conversely, to identify with a very high degree of probability the guilty. DNA is now used in medicine to detect the possibility that diseases having a genetic origin may occur in an individual. This enables doctors to prescribe preventative treatments. It is hope 4.1.2 Geographical data Modern maps are now mostly assembled by computers using very large collections of geographical data, such as latitude, longitude, altitude, roads and towns. Collections of data like this (stored in databases) aim to eliminate the need to duplicate data. The data in databases is described in symbols that the computer can handle, i.e. numbers. Even the names of features are symbolised using numbers. If I were trying to tell you the way to a particular street in a town, using only t Sharing power and transforming educational practice Learning to teach: making sense of learning to teach
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This free course, Sharing power and transforming educational practice, explores the notion of a life of learning and interrogates 'common-sense' assumptions about schooling. It considers what is the research process and how becoming a co-researcher with the people with whom you work can transform your expectations and practice.
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This free course, Making sense of learning to teach, is the first of four courses which comprise the course Learning to teach. It draws on what we know about how people learn to become teachers. It explores the different approaches to teacher education and the different routes into teaching. It will help you to understand the philosophical and practical differences between the different approaches. It draws on research about students' experiences of learning to teach and considers the implicatio
