English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

So far I have been doing research on the usability of Opera and some of its convenient features. Since our audience is an IT department, any feature that will help save time or keep data/information organized is helpful. The main feature that stands out about Opera is the “Speed Dial”, where you can have nine “buttons” as your home page. This allows the user to access frequently used pages very fast. This would be great for an IT person that uses a lot of web based network utilities.

This week’s reading contained a lot of common sense information about being ethical. However, I still feel like there is a lot of gray area with ethics on topics dealing with the environment and examples like Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt. And obviously, everyone is going to have a different opinion on what is ethical and what isn’t.

This week was spent researching the functions and operation of the Opera web browser. I’ve used Opera in the past so I was somewhat familiar with its functionality, but knew there was a lot more to learn based on the needs of our project.

Our group meeting was once again very productive. The agenda was mainly focused on fixing our proposal to correctly meet the project requirements. We also focused on splitting up the work load between group members in order to give everyone a fair share. The group definitely fell into stride by the end of the meeting, with everyone knowing exactly what they should be doing/working on.

After I dusted off my Thompson Handbook and began reading, I remembered how hard it is to follow this book. I know we’ve all said it before, but man, it’s like kryptonite. However, I got through it and gained some useful knowledge.

The first couple days of this project have been spent getting organized and beginning to jump into the project. I figure it’s better to start with a clear idea of where you want the project to end up rather than figuring out as you go. The hardest part is trying to maintain the plan you have as the project progresses.

The purpose of our first group meeting was to pick a topic, choose roles, and get the ball rolling on developing our white paper. We were very productive with good communication and ideas flowing. Each group member played an active role in the discussion and everyone stepping up to complete specific tasks. If our group meetings continue to be this productive we should have no trouble successfully completing this project.

I’ve seen the phrase “white papers” in the past but never really spent any time thinking about what it was or what it designated. It almost sounds like classified government documents, which I guess they could be. Now that I know the actual definition of a white paper I realize that I have read an inordinate amount of them. In fact, I think I spend more time reading white papers than I do other documents.