THIS IS ESSENTIAL IF
YOU WANT
CREDIT FOR YOUR
WORK!
When you prepare a file to
upload, you MUST give the document a file name that
starts with your last name and
includes whatever other information is indicated on the
calendar entry or assignment. For example, you would save
the file that contains a second draft of your first paper
like this: Goodloe-paper1-draft2.doc
Why This is Important: While I'm on
campus, I download all the attached files from CULearn and
then review them at home, but if the downloaded files have
vague names like paper.doc, then I can’t easily sort
through them. And if I can’t easily tell that a file
belongs to a current student, I may not open it. In fact, I
recommend that you always start your file names with your
last name when you intend to send a document as an attached
file, so that the receiver can easily recognize whose
document it is after he or she downloads it.
Note: Depending on your default settings, Word will append
the .doc extension automatically. If that’s the case for
your version of Word, then you don’t need to type it in
manually.
If Word appends a .docx extension instead of .doc, then you
are using the newest version of Word (2007 for Windows or
2008 for Mac), which saves files in a completely new coding
language. This new format cannot be opened by users who
have an older version of Word unless they have a converter,
so I recommend that you change your default settings to
save all your Word documents in the older format. You can’t
change the file to the older version simply by typing .doc
at the end or editing the file name to remove the “x.” See
the page on File Formats for more information.
Please also use hyphens instead of spaces
in your file names. Otherwise, when you send your files
over the internet they will come to me with the spaces
translated into this symbol: %20. The result is file names
that look like this: Goodloe%20paper%202%20draft.doc As you
can see, the file name is difficult to read.
FORMATTING FILE NAMES FOR PEER REVIEWS
When the calendar entry asks you to download
classmates’ drafts and comment on them using Word’s review
tools, you will need to rename the file before you post it
back to CULearn. Doing this has several benefits. The most
important is that it will allow me to easily find your peer
reviews after I download them to my computer, so that
you’ll get credit for your work. When I'm evaluating your
peer reviews, I will sort files by the initials they start
with, and if your peer review file doesn’t follow the
correct format, I won’t find it.
Another important benefit will become clear when you start
downloading files that contain comments from your
classmates. If they don’t change the file name to include
their initials first, you’ll end up with a bunch of files
that have the same name and you won’t know which is which.
Let’s say Jane Miller posts a revision of Paper 2 with this
file name: Miller-paper2-revision.doc And then Bob L. Smith
downloads the file and comments on it. Before he uploads
the file for Jane to see, he should change the file name
like this: BLS-Miller-paper2-revision.doc If Jane had used
the wrong file name in her initial posting, Bob should
change it to be correct.