English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

This week our group narrowed our topic choices down to a comparison of routers designed for home networking. After identifying our subject area and audience, I was able to find three popular router options in the $40 - $60 price range that our group will be researching. These include the D-Link DIR-615, the Netgear WGR614, and the Linksys WRT54G2.

This week was a lot easier than what I did last week. Since I had some free time I worked on our gantt chart. While I was working on it I looked at the schedule to what we have due for the next couple of weeks. I then told my teammates about it through an email saying I would submit it later if they had any changes they felt were necessary. Ten thirty P.M. came around and I did not receive any emails from my teammates with changes so I submitted it to the English 421 website and called it a night.

The second week of working on the white paper project was an awakening for our group. The first thing we had to decide was what to do about the direction of our project. The first proposal didn’t meet the requirements and we would have to make a large overhaul to have it work. The group all came to the conclusion to pick a totally different topic. We decided to pick comparing/contrasting different web browsers (Opera, Firefox, IE) in an small IT company/department setting. After picking the new topic, research was divided among group members.

This week's tasks for ENGL421 began with the reading assignment and response concerning research. This reading was very relevant to our groups white paper project as our research will begin shortly, and individual research blogs, tracking this effort, will also be due in a matter of time. For my portion of the group's research, I've decided to focus in on an online approach. This seems quite fitting for this course, as it is online, but I think it will also be the most efficient and accurate way for me to gather information.

During week 12 of this project I began by researching how to create a gantt chart, as I was tasked with this. I had a copy of Microsoft Project, so I chose to use it to make the chart. After reviewing the calendar, the group decided which activities were going to be accomplished individually, and those that would be done as a group. I used this information to create the chart, and followed the submission deadlines posted on the calendar.

This week our group made significant progress with our white paper project. We began by constructing a thoroughly thought-out Ghantt chart. In doing this, our main goal was to distribute the various tasks evenly between all of the members, and also plan out a course of action. These tasks were divided between the five weeks available for the project, namely weeks 12 thru 16. The first week was focused on the project proposal, while the current week was focused on the construction of a Ghantt chart and the outlining of a research plan.

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 this week, week 13, our group is making great progress toward our White Paper project. This week mainly concentrated on making the gnatt chart as well as researching and combining our thoughts on our topic. Also, we have divided up the how the research was going to broken up.

In concluding this week, it feels as though we’ve completed the second milestone of our project, and an important milestone it was. Having elected to propose both how and why the lack of collaboration negatively affects small organizations in the first milestone, much of the work this week was spent preparing how to tackle covering the topic.

This week for Group 8 was a productive one. On Monday we all met in a chat room via AIM. There we discussed how we wanted to approach the project. We had found that our audience for our white paper needed a more specific audience. In our proposal we stated that our primary audience would be political leaders. We learned that this audience is too broad and needed to be more specific; therefore, we narrowed our primary audience to someone that is in charge of making new policies for energy, such as the Secretary of Energy.