English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

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.

GROUP ACTIVITY REPORT
Date: 04/03/09
To: Nathaniel Rivers, Instructor
From: Chris Kirkwood, Andy Jones, Isaac Townsend, and Nigel Hess
Subject: Group #3 Activity Report 1

For our first week of creating our white paper we started with the basics. First we created a Google Group. This is an important step, especially for an online class since we do not have an actual class time to meet. Through our Google group and email, we exchanged information which included our email addresses, screen names, and phone numbers. We plan to use our Google group to its fullest capacity by adding blog posts on it so that any one of us can edit and add to it when we see fit or just posting announcements that will be sent out to all group members.

The tasks to accomplish in week 12 included contacting team members and opening lines of communication, choosing a topic, splitting up the work, writing a proposal, and providing support documents detailing the progress of the group and the individuals within it.

This week has been mostly about organizing our collaboration, choosing our topic, and writing the proposal.

Overall, the first week in Group 8 went well. The group consists of me (Dean Basso), Adam Persohn, Adam Waters, Lindsay Petrovi, and Michael Sheridan. Some things that we accomplished in week one were picking our topic, organizing our group, establishing a Google documents page, and setting group meetings. The topic was chosen to be oil dependence and renewable energy solutions. We were very skeptical on picking this subject because of the popularity of “green” topics, but we went with it anyways. We found the topic to be very interesting and very informative.

The purpose of our first group meeting was to pick a topic, choose roles, and get the ball rolling on developing our white paper. We were very productive with good communication and ideas flowing. Each group member played an active role in the discussion and everyone stepping up to complete specific tasks. If our group meetings continue to be this productive we should have no trouble successfully completing this project.

This week our group has accomplished several tasks related to our white paper project. The greatest accomplishment was setting up a means for communication. We have decided that the best way to communicate with each other is via email. To do this, we have been sending out group emails so that everyone is aware of what is going on. Ultimately we feel that this will prove effective throughout the course of this project.

To get started this week, our group members e-mailed and traded
contact information. We spent most of Tuesday brainstorming and
narrowing down our topic choices, and finally settled on dealing with
wireless security for home networks. We then started to brainstorm
how we might tackle the project and divide up responsibility for both
the proposal and the activity reports.

We settled on using Google Docs to post and share information as we
work, and then decided that one person would be responsible for
writing the bulk of our weekly report and posting it to the course