I'm a Drupal developer about to start teaching a class at a community organization. The class will focus on basic Internet literacy, and provide hands-on experience with a couple of open source content management systems.
We're going to have a highly diverse group of 6+ students, from high school students to musicians to fledgling programmers. My plan is to focus on explaining the fundamentals of Internet technologies in an illuminating way, and then split the group up into a team that works together with me to build and maintain the organization's web tools.
I'm looking for any videos, texts, books, articles that explains basic Internet and web technologies in a direct, accessible way. I am not looking for non-technical media, but really clear and concise technical media. More "Internet for plumbers" than "Internet for dummies".
Online resources are good, as it would reinforce the kind of online literacy we want to teach. Free resources are crucial -- we're all pretty broke. My working hypothesis, based on talking to students, is that whatever their skill level, nobody has a thorough, high-level mental model of what exactly happens when you type a URL into your location bar and head off into the wilds of the web.
So far, I've found Wikipedia and browsing the early papers about national/global networking to be my best resources. Got any ideas?