English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

There seemed to be a little less to do this week when compared to previous weeks. I didn’t have to spend my time researching or writing a white paper since our rough draft had already been created. I reviewed our instructor’s comments and our white paper to thing about in what various ways it could be fixed. I looked over my notes from the research that I had take and made sure that I didn’t forget to include anything. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t forget any key parts that could make our white paper more effective. I think that our focus on open source vs.

I spent this week gathering my thoughts about all the information I had collected from the previous week’s research. I organized my research to decide how I could present my research in a non bias way. I found that it was a little difficult to think of wording some parts to not make the presentation of my research sound bias. I displayed some facts about how there is very little cost in purchasing when it comes to open source software. The fact that I made summaries of my researched sites allowed me to easily remember what information I had available to present.

This week I was focusing my attention on thumbnails and research. I created my thumbnail with the idea that I wanted some color to the top and bottom of my white paper. I realized after looking at my group member’s thumbnails that a two column idea will look better for our white paper. I think we will stick with the idea of using a 3D graph like the one I used in my white paper. I also included in my thumbnail what a sample cover page may look like if we went with my layout.

My next bit or research focused on the types of issues that may arise from implementing open source in a school. I hope by knowing what types of problems may arise that I will be able to know what to look out for. This will help us to address some concerns that may be raised by the readers of our white paper. I hope that we can address these concerns before the readers get it in their mind that this may not work for them. There are 5 key questions that were raised in an article I found. The first one was about how will your current systems be compatible with the new systems.

I started to research how beneficial open source solutions would be for a school. I was aimed at looking at some figures. What I discovered was spidertoos.com. Here this website for Linux training experts has an article about the cost savings. With the current economical times and the want to reduce costs this could be a key focus in our white paper as to why to switch to open source. One of the focuses of the article is to use Open Office instead of Microsoft Office.

My research lead me to find an article by Computerworld. This article focuses on some of the differences between Open Office and Microsoft Office. I discovered that Open Office does not have the “Ribbon” that Microsoft Office has. This isn’t a large concern however since the “Ribbon” that they are referring to is they design of Microsoft Office 2007. Since we are focusing on a schools using open source, there is a high chance that schools aren’t using Microsoft 2007. This means that the “Ribbon” isn’t a large concern.

Here is my sample thumbnail.

According to Chapter 5 in TCT there are 3 main types of ethics. There are personal ethics, social ethics, and conservation ethics. When I think about the ethics involved in my previous instructions project the first thing that comes to mind is plagiarism. Many of us were creating instructions on how to use products that I believe most all of which already have instructions about them. It would have been very easy for someone to just look at some existing instructions and copy that down for their instruction set.

This week I looked at how we could narrow down our broad audience. I realized that the scope of my group’s white paper was too broad. It would be impractical for us to cover the whole range of schools in our paper on open source instead of Microsoft products. I helped in deciding that we would focus on a smaller audience to help make our white paper more effective. This much necessary narrowing of our white paper will allow us to create a much more effective paper. I was in charge of writing this week’s group activity report. I also began researching for our white paper.

Week 13 got off to a rolling start thanks to last week’s topic picking and decisions on group communication. Upon taking a look at the week's tasks and seeing we needed to develop a Gantt chart we decided we needed to assign tasks to each of us. We decided that we would alternate who writes the group activity blog for each week. This will allow all of our group members the opportunity to accomplish this task. Zephyrus (Jack) took charge of creating the Gantt chart due to his knowledge from previous courses that required Gantt charts.