Web Article Topics

Class, for our next assignment, you’ll be asked to write a web article – we were calling it a ‘research paper,’ but that implies you’ll be citing sources in a bibliography and writing something really lengthy, neither of which is required!

Instead, we ask that you write a short (450-800 words) article that summarizes an idea, debate, or history of comparable scale (i.e. don’t do this on ‘how the internet was invented,’ you won’t be able to cover that topic in 800 words). Here are some topics to choose from:

  • How GPS ‘works’
  • How is reading news on mobile changing journalism?
  • How did the W3C (world wide web consortium) start, and how are people elected to it?
  • What were the ‘Browser Wars?’
  • Why do so many Web designers complain about the Internet Explorer browser?
  • How do hard drives work?
  • How can diversity be increased in the Computer Sciences?
  • What is Code.org, and what problems is it trying to address?
  • How are social media apps like Snapchat and Twitter being leveraged by advertisers?
  • What is encryption, and how does it work?
  • What is a CMS, and how does it work?
  • How does WiFi work?
  • What is Packet Switching, and how does it allow the Internet to function?
  • What is Bandwidth, and what affects it?
  • What is Net Neutrality, and why is it important?
  • How are political campaigns using social media and the Internet?

If you’d like to write your article on another topic, you must get that topic approved by me in advance. One purpose of this project is to ask you to research a topic related to this class, so you’ll have to justify your choice of topic.

Once you write your article, you’ll be asked to move its content into an HTML/CSS ‘boilerplate,’ mark up the article with the correct HTML tags (<h1>, <h2>, <p>, <img>, etc.), and then style the page to have a custom font, color scheme, floated images, and effective use of margin and padding. We’ll also use media queries to make it responsive.

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