Computer Basics and PC Software

 Blog is a website where entries are written as information or news on a particular subject. You may choose any subject for writing a blog like food, health, or information about IGNOU dates etc. A blog may combine text, images, or other media components; however, most blogs are textual. They may also provide links to other web pages or blogs. In addition, blog allows you to leave comments in an interactive format. Blogging is becoming increasingly popular among students as it allows you publish and keep record of your ideas over time. In addition, you may get some useful comments on your ideas may be from your teacher or your peer group or other people. A blog need not be restricted to a single author; it can merge different kinds of ideas, including fellow students, teachers, and subject specialists. An example: http://edu.blogs.com/. Many famous personalities these days are hosting their own blog. The following is one of the many websites through which you can create your own bl...

 A social network is a network of individuals which have some sort of interdependence on each other. This interdependence may be in the form of friendship, kinship, common causes and so on. A Social networking service may be offered through a web site on the Internet. Some of the popular social networking services are – Orkut, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedln, MySpace, Friend Finder, Yahoo! 360, Classmates and many more.  You need to register to a social networking service in order to use it. Some of the features provided by these services are:  Creation of a profile page of your own informing others about the information that you would like to share about you.  Viewing of profile pages of others.  Creating your own network of friends.  Searching online friends.  Putting your albums online for your friends.  Sharing your thoughts and experiences.  Sharing of audio and video may be through youTube – a popular website where you can put your videos for general public viewership...

 Collaboration is defined as an act or process of working together on a project or some intellectual activity.  But what is the importance of collaboration? The world is increasingly becoming globalised on issues like environment protection, control of terrorism, international business, learning etc. In such changing circumstances, even the scientific explorations have become collaborative. Thus, in this global world, role of the Internet tools is to enable collaboration among people. From this perspective chat, news groups, wikis all are some basic tools for collaboration. Collaboration involves both communication and sharing of ideas. Modern day science, to certain extent, has become collaborative. Today, you may find a number of research papers coauthored by many people staying at geographically diverse places.  Each collaborative project has several social, political, ethical and technical issues that are to be addresses at the start of the project itself.  Some ...

In the present era, you can get access to a large number of electronic educational resources through the web. These resources may be on different specialized areas. These resources include the electronic journals, encyclopedias, dictionaries, digital libraries, educational resource databases, indexing and abstracting databases and electronic books. However, please note that some of these resources require paid subscription. These resources allow you to browse through the abstracts, search on various topics, and access the complete information for research in specific areas. Some of these electronic resources are listed below:  E-Journals and Databases  ACM Digital Library  EBSCO database  IEL Online  JSTOR  Lawyers Collective Magazine  Lecture note in Mathematics  Maths Sci_net  Project Muse  ProQuest  Springer Link  Taylor and Francis WTO E-library Indexing and Abstracting Databases:  LISA  J-Gate E-Books  Credo References  Idea-Reference Resources  NetLibrary WIKI...

E-learning is one of the most used terms on the Internet that describes any form of learning that is facilitated academically by the electronic means. Such means may be in the form of multimedia rich contents, web based lectures and web based tutorials or training programmes. In general, E-learning is strongly supported electronically by the administrative, academic and assessment processes.  Some of the activities that may be done using such electronic form using web sites include providing multimedia based contents, providing assignments, conducting on line tests, lectures or discussions through web conferencing, feedback on students work, student progress report to faculty etc.  Some of the major advantages of E-learning are:  It allows creation and fast update of online contents.  You may use the contents at your own pace and convenience.  E-learning also provides a possibility of standardization of contents that can be changed much faster.  It has the potential of pro...

3.0 INTRODUCTION  As discussed in the previous unit, Internet has many applications for its user. In the recent times, one of the major applications of Internet has been the Web 2.0 technologies that are identified by more interactive Internet based applications. Some of the popular technologies used in Web 2.0 include XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), eXtensible Markup Language (XML), Asynchronous JavaScript on XML (Ajax), Ruby on Rails, Adobe Flex, Java and its frameworks, PHP, ASP.net and many more. The aim of this unit is not to introduce you to these technologies but familiarize you with some of the important applications that have been developed using these technologies under the Web 2.0. These newer applications are allowing you to do a number of activities that were unthinkable in the last decade. Today, you can go to social networking sites through which you can find and remain in touch with your friends. You can share your pictures, videos, ideas with them. You can go ...

The Internet has many advantages; however, it also opens up security threat. In this section we just want to highlight some of the threats that you may face because of being an Internet users. When you use internet you are faced with three basic threat situations:  Confidentiality: No unauthorized person should be able to read or copy information that s/he is not supposed to read.  Integrity: No unauthorized person should be able to modify information.  Availability: No unauthorized person should be able to erase information or make it inaccessible. The other threats posed on the Internet are due to Computer Viruses and identity information thefts.  To make sure the above security situations the following methods may be followed by you:  Authentication and authorization mostly using username and password are used by most Internet security systems. Therefore, your username and password are very important and should be such that they cannot be broken easily. In addition, you ...

The word chat in English language means - casual conversation. On Internet it means the same, except that you need to use text and your keyboard skills are tested. Earlier chatting was possible only between two people, now you can enjoy chatting with a number of people at a time. Now, you can use Voice Chat – it requires microphone and speaker; and Video Chat – it requires microphone, speakers and web camera. You can chat even using your mobile if it had that facility.  Chat is normally done in a chat room. Some of the common chat services are yahoo messenger (yahoo), Gtalk (Google ), RediffBol. We will just show you an example using gtalk. However, you may use any other chat software. Remember you need to download and install chat software of your choice. After installing the chat software, you may run it to open the chat window so that you can start chatting. Figure 2.16 shows a typical chat window. To chat, you just type in the text and press the Enter key. Most chat services al...

Internet has changed the art of writing letters to email. Email is one of the ways on Internet to send messages to another person across the network. E-mail and postal mail coexist in the present India. In our country, the reach of postal mail is far more penetrative through technically you may claim that e-mail has the potential to reach every village may be through mobile devices. The e-mail system has been designed on the postal system that is why in email you have to write the email address of the sender and the recipient. In case the address of the receiver is incorrect the mail is undelivered and returns back to the sender. The advantages of e-mail over postal mail may be:  E-mail is faster than postal mail.  E-mail cannot be lost like letters and can be stored for life long.  It can be edited and forwarded to other users.  Emails are not affected by distances. It can be sent anywhere in world in seconds unlike postal mails.  You can add video and audio with the e-mail. The ...

The Internet consists of millions of private/public/academic/business and government networks having local to global scope. It has billions of web pages on varied topics that may be accessed by you. Thus, if you are asked to surf the net for specific information relating to a topic, it may take years before you could find all the pages related topic you are looking for. How can you make this process faster? Well perhaps you require the service of a search engine on the Internet. Some of the popular search engines on the Internet are: Yahoo!, Google, Bing, Ask.com and many more. These are the tools to help you locate the content that you are looking for. A search engine can be defined as a tool to search diverse and disorganized sources of information available on the Internet. You can clearly visualize from this definition that a search engine has to use some automated programs that needs to continuously keep visiting the web pages about the content they have and organize the informati...

Browsing also called Surfing the process of looking into the information available in the web. One of the preconditions for browsing is that you should be connected to the Internet. For connecting to Internet you should have an Internet account with a service provider (like MTNL, BSNL) and you have done the connection settings on your computer relating to that account.  Activity: Set up a connection to Internet on your Computer. Ask for the relevant settings.  2.2.1 What is Browser? A Web browser is software application that enables you to find, retrieve, and display information available on the World Wide Web (WWW). Browser also allows you to traverse information resources on the WWW. As you know that the information on the Web is organized and formatted using tags of a Markup language called Hypertext Markup Language or HTML. A web browser is converts the HTML tags and their content into a formatted display of information. Thus, a web browser allows you to see the rich web c...

 2.0 INTRODUCTION In the previous unit, you have gone through the concepts relating to networking and Internet. The Internet is the network of networks and is used for many applications. Internet allows you to share resources and applications with ease. The Internet uses TCP/IP as its basic protocol on which many more application level protocols have been developed. The Internet can carry any digital signals such as text, graphics, sound, video and animation. Today, Internet has thousands of networks and millions of users, using many services.  Uses of Internet technologies have become common place in recent times. Since, the advent of Mosaic Browser in 1993, the popularity of web and its users grew very fast. The web application during this era primarily wanted to provide information about various organizations and some basic interaction with the clientele. Even in this time some of major usages of Internet were to browse and search the information and communication through e...

 We can classify the computers connected with Internet in two categories, servers and clients. A server is a computer with the capacity to provide connectivity and sharing to multiple personal computers or clients (any computing device you use to access the Internet), which is specifically set up to serve its files to client computers. The files that a server makes available to your computer can be web pages, videos, sounds, images, etc. A web server normally has:  A high end computer with web server software. The three most popular web server software are:  Apache HTTP Server, available in public domain  Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS)  Sun Java System Web Server  A very good Internet connection speed, so that it can support multiple simultaneous users.  Its own URL and IP address. (What is a URL? URL - Uniform Resource Locator. URL is theglobal address of a document or resource on the WWW) For your home computer to be able to receive files or any data from a s...