English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

This week I worked on my part of the white paper project which is performance. In this part I plan on telling the reader about these products in terms of specs and how well they operate. I put them all in the same formatting and made each part almost exactly the same in terms of layout so you could figure out where the same information is in each part to create a kind of comparison type paper. I used some of the information from the previously written research blogs and also did some more research to come up with more hard date.

It was nice to see our project come together without any giant problems this week.

I spent most of my time this week working on the layout of our white paper draft. I wrote the introduction, designed the cover page quickly using images from our report, and then created a table of contents. After formatting my own section of the draft (the introduction), I began integrating the pieces that Joe, Pat and Shane had e-mailed to me.

For this week I only had to put into words what I have researched so far for this project in order to bring our parts of the project into a whole rough draft. I took sections from my research blogs and molded them to fit into a flowing document that would work in the white paper, which made making the draft pretty easy. I also arranged a bulleted list of the specifications of my certain router that would be later put into a chart on our white paper. I also picked out some good photos from my sources in order to use them in our project.

This week was one of the busiest weeks so far for this project. The week started off with me making up a draft of the thumbnail to present to my fellow group members as a possible layout for out white paper. I didn't think that mine was the best draft but I think some good ideas came from what I had presented. My other group members did have some good ideas and over all great plans on what it should look like over all. Other than working on a thumbnail I did research. I found a great website that should be used for getting our information to put in our paper.

Date: April 19, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Brian O’Leary, Group 2
Subject: Individual Activity Report 3

This activity report accounts for the progress I have made from April 13th to April 19th

The majority of my time this week was spent on researching information for the white paper. Using credible sources I research not only how geothermal technology worked in general but also focused my research on vertical loop geothermal systems. While I did find a good diagram that depicted a vertical loop geothermal system, I would like to also try and find some more facts and figures in regards to time/money that a vertical loop system requires. I believe that this is important as it will provide our audience with all the information to they need to make an educated decision.

This week was a busy week for me. First, on Monday, I participated in our weekly group meeting online through AIM. Next, I came up with a design for our white paper. The thumbnail was due Wednesday, and I struggled to get it exactly how I wanted; I couldn't get an active sidebar similar to the white paper example (steak and sizzle one). I then proceeded to comment on my group members' thumbnail sketches. I liked features from all of them, but I believe that we should start with Adam Waters' as his has the sidebar that I was seeking to employ.

This week was a productive week for me and everyone else in the group. Although there wasn't much group work to do this week, there was plenty of individual work to be done. On Monday I continued with my research for our white paper. I also did the white paper thumbnail assignment on Wednesday then had a group meeting, after we had all turned in our thumbnails and commented on each members in our group, to decide how we wanted the final design of our white paper to look. We ended up deciding to incorporate what we thought of as the best parts of each design for our white paper.

This previous week was a tough week as a group. I attempted to get a group meeting scheduled, but none of us were able to meet up at the same time. All of our discussion occurred through email and in our Google Group.

This past week was very productive, both in terms of group progress and my individual progress. At the end of last week, our group was challenged with focusing the definition of our target audience to something more specific. Through some research and discussion, we decided the target audience of our white paper would be the American Secretary of Energy, Stephen Chu.