Introduction to Personal Computing
As computing becomes increasingly ubiquitous in our lives, you need more than just office software skills to keep up. This course attempts to provide you with:
- Office software skills;
- A working knowledge of the various hardware components of computing devices;
- How operating system software, application software, and networks collaborate to make your computing environment work;
- How computer systems organize data, and how you can handle "information overload" problems with computing technology;
- How to use spreadsheets and databases to model situations at work or in your voluntary organizations;
- The legal and ethical issues arising from intellectual property restrictions on what you can download;
- How social networking and mobile devices are changing the way we live.
Typical Lecture and Lab Topics
- Documents, Applications, and Computing Platforms
- Making Best Use of the Internet
- The Open Source Revolution
- File Management and Digital Encoding
- Intellectual Property and Copyright issues
- Operating Systems
- Computer Hardware
- Does it pay to buy a hybrid car? How to model the problem with Microsoft Excel
- Database management
- Multimedia processing
- Mobile devices
- Social Networking
- Web Authoring with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
- Viruses and Other Evil Software
- Encryption and Privacy
- Electronic Commerce
- Artificial Intelligence and the Limits to Computation