For those of us who are Gen Z, we essentially have been the first to grow up with the digital age. As a child, I grew up playing Club Penguin and Cooking Mama on my pink Nintendo DS and a clunky PC in my dad’s office of old computers. My first phone was one of the first Iphones that ever came out. In middle school, my 6th grade homeroom was the first to introduce iPads into the classroom. In high school, my english class was the first to introduce the 1:1 laptop program where we brought in our own laptops to school every day. It wasn’t until college that Artificial Intelligence started to take over and I had no idea about it until my dad showed me ChatGPT. However, I feel as though many of us are either too young to know the nuts of bolts of the internet (since it was considered to have been invented in 1983), and/or just take for granted what is behind what we see on our screens every single day. Personally, I am just an art major that does not know much about computer science and these are many of the terms that I have recently come to learn about:
– CMS: stands for content management systems- programs that generate sites and make it easy to change the content.
– HDML: content instructure for a website, how words are used in creating a website from scratch.
– CSS: cascading style sheets, also for creating a website from scratch and the look and feel of the site.
– Javascript: interactivity and the language in the script.
– SEO: stands for search engine optimization and is the art of getting a website as far up the top of a search list as possible.
– Paid Search: whoever bids the most money gets higher on search results.
– Generic Search: where someone pays someone else who knows how to get a website higher up on the search results list. This is important because a company pratically does not exist unless they are on page 1.
– Plugin: a software add-on that enhances website capabilities and helps with search engine rankings.
– Monetization: content marketing and making a profit off of selling a product online.
– Analytics: data that shows how many users/people have viewed a website (cookies), etc.
– HTML: the content of a website. Pages hace one heading and one body, a beginning tag and an end tag– this is essentially the coding that forms with website. Accessability is an important part of this as well.
– Themes: pre-coded/designed website formats that do not always work the same with regards to editing.
Artificial Intelligence Options
LLMs: Large Language Models
– ChatGPT
– Perplixity
– Microsoft Copilot
– Anthropic Claude
– Google Gemini
– X.ai Grok
– DeepSeek