What is a group blog?
A group blog is just like a regular blog except more than one person can make entries. Group blogs can be used by professors for classes, by student organizations for publicity, by a group of friends for fun, or any other non-commercial purpose.
Hello, everybody--
This week's I'll talk about the new features available since the upgrade of our blog server earlier in the week.
What's the blog server?
Um, right, I guess not everybody knows that. The blog server is a system where anybody at WOU can keep a blog; if you aren't familiar with the idea of blogging, please take a look at the FAQ at http://www.wou.edu/ucs/faq/blogging.php. If you've never used the blog server before, you probably want to take a look at the original blog server FAQs; part one is at http://www.wou.edu/ucs/faq/blogserver1.php, and contains a link to part 2. Both have been updated for the new blog server version.
Hello, everybody--
This week we're announcing the beta version of the WOUPortal! It's available for use by anyone in the WOU community.
What's the WOUPortal?
It is a web portal, which is a customizable page designed to make many web resources available in one place. The home pages of yahoo.com and msn.com are good examples of portals; they include lots of information, links and resources, and if you log in, you can customize them to show what you want, and hide what you don't want. The WOU Portal is available to anyone with a WOU email address, and just like other portals is customizable so you can see the links and information you find most useful. The goal is to make so many useful features available here that you'll want to use it as your browser's start page.
Hello, everyone--
Since last week's FAQ on peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, we've gotten some new information. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is beginning a crackdown on illegal file sharing at universities, and we'd like to pass that warning along to you, as well as tell you about an alternative source of free and legal music for students.
Who is the RIAA, anyway?
The Recording Industry Association of America is a group that includes all of the major music recording companies, representing well over a thousand recording labels. In recent years they have strongly focused on preventing illegal distribution of music, and one result of this is lawsuits against people found to be illegally sharing copyrighted music through peer-to-peer software. You can see their website at http://www.riaa.com/. Note that a similar organization, the Motion Picture Association of America, fills the same role for the movie industry, and has been suing people who illegally share movies.
Hello, everyone--
This week's topic is peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. It's been in the media a lot recently, and unfortunately there's a lot of misunderstanding about it, and about WOU's policies towards it.
What is peer-to-peer file sharing?
Every computer running a P2P file sharing program (such as LimeWire, BitTorrent, or iMesh) acts as a server so others using the same program can download files from it. It also lets the user search for and download files being shared by other computers running the same software. This is a benefit when legal files are being shared, since there doesn't have to be an expensive central server that everybody downloads from. But if the shared files are illegal, this is a drawback, because there is no single source to shut down.
Hello, everyone--
This week, we're going back to basics. We've had more than the usual number of questions lately about saving files, and where to put them, so that's this week's topic.
Help! The computer crashed and I lost what I was working on! Can I get it back?
You can only get back the part that was saved. For the sake of speed, unsaved data is only stored in the computer's memory, which is completely reset when the system crashes or is rebooted. When you save a document, this writes it to some form of more permanent storage, such as a network drive or flash drive. Needless to say, you should save often when working on a document. In fact, the very first thing you should do when you start a document is save it.
Hello, everyone--
After a year-long hiatus, the Friday FAQs are back! In case you weren't here when we last sent these out, the basic idea is that we take one technical topic per week and work through it in as non-technical a manner as possible. For more information, including why we call these documents "FAQs", please see the FAQ archive at "http://www.wou.edu/faq. Some of you, of course, are reading this on paper; since we wanted as many people as possible to see this particular FAQ, we are sending it out by multiple methods.
This week's topic is communication with UCS; how you talk to us, and how we talk to you. At the end is a link to a survey so you can give us feedback.
