English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

Date: April 12, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Brian O’Leary, Group 2
Subject: Individual Activity Report 2

This activity report accounts for the progress I have made from April 6th to April 12th

I believe that one of the most important things that needs to be researched for our white paper topic is the audience. Our main audience needs to be researched in particular. Once the basic knowledge of our audience is understood it will be easier to tailor our white paper to suit their needs. We also need to understand the basic needs of our white paper. In short, we basically need to know why someone needs to be reading our white paper. It would also be a good idea to research the basic or more common implementations of wind turbine technology.

Date: April 5, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Brian O’Leary, Group 2
Subject: Individual Activity Report 1

This activity report accounts for the progress I have made from March 30th to April 5th.

After reading this weeks readings I feel that the document markup would be the best form of usability testing that I could use. I think that this would be especially useful for my novice instruction set. I think this is because when people are first starting out with something new it is a lot easier to become confused when you do not understand something. I also think that the document markup would be best because something that makes perfect sense to me may not make little or no sense to a novice.

For my novice direction set I want to show people how to use a virtual machine to install a new operating system. The OS I will be installing will be FreeBSD which is a Unix OS. These instructions will include how to use VMWare to install and set up a virtual machine and the steps to take to install FreeBSD. My advanced instruction set will include how to install X-Windows and Gnome so the user can have a nice graphical interface and not have to mess around with only the command line.