English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

This week was a much easier week for me than last week. I began by contacting my group to set up a time to meet so that we could go over the revisions of our white paper. After several emails we decided to meet on Wednesday. On Tuesday, I did a little more research on Opera. Using my research, I rewrote the problem section to balance with the other browsers. I also rewrote the Opera paragraph in our introduction.

The majority of this week was spent writing and revising the white paper. On Monday, I met with my group online to discuss the writing of the white paper. Once we decided on all of our sections and the format of our paper, I began writing. I got started writing the Opera section of the paper using Stephens notes. On Tuesday, I finished up writing the Opera section and started to write the introduction. On Wednesday, I used Gary's notes to write the Firefox section of the paper and then finished writing the Introduction and Executive Summary portions of the paper.

This week was primarily spent researching and preparing to write the rough draft. I began the week by researching the main differences between the three browsers that we are comparing. The other members of my group are researching the individual browsers, but since I am the writer I need at least an idea of the general differences between the browsers to start. After researching these differences, I began to research the needs of IT departments.

For my third research blog, I again wanted to look specifically at web browser features that companies would want and need. The place that I found information was the Univeristy of Washington who did a study to find out what the browser needs of researchers were:
http://uwnews.org/uweek/article.aspx?id=47237

The second source that I found to offer a lot of information was:
http://humanresources.about.com/od/hristechnology/a/assess_needs.htm

When I began my research, I decided to look at all three of the web browsers from a general viewpoint, to try and find their key differences and similarities. The following web-site helped the most:
http://hubpages.com/hub/What-is-the-best-browser

The readings for this week focused on ethics in technical settings. At this point in my college career, most of the ethical dilemmas that I have faced have dealt with plagiarism and cheating. These problems have mostly dealt with personal ethics. In the instructions project, I also had to deal with a dilemma of social as well as personal ethics. In chapter 5 of TCT, there was an example used of children choking on the small parts of action figures. I faced a similar problem in my instructions project.

Since my group’s first topic and audience didn’t quite work with the requirements for the white paper project, I spent the beginning part of the week trying to find new ideas for a topic. The two best topics that I could think up were campus security issues and child locating devices. On Wednesday, I met with my group in a Google Chat to decide what our topic would be. After I presented my topic choices, and everyone else explained theirs, we decided to do our white paper about the different web browsers that were available to small companies.

For the second version of our white paper, we decided to focus our attention on web browsers. We will focus on the problem of streamlining browser use within companies. The three browsers that we will highlight in our paper are Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. The main purpose for our white paper will be to compare and contrast these three with respect to the needs of small companies, rather than individual users. Some of the main points that we have come up with so far are security, usability, and ability to restrict access.