English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

The first couple days of this project have been spent getting organized and beginning to jump into the project. I figure it’s better to start with a clear idea of where you want the project to end up rather than figuring out as you go. The hardest part is trying to maintain the plan you have as the project progresses.

This activity report will summarize the progress I have made since the start of the English 421 White Paper Project.

This first week involved introducing myself to the other members of the group through email. I spent about 15 to 30 minutes familiarizing myself with google docs since this was the way we decided to share documents among the group.

I played the role of organizer for group 4 in this first week of the project. I contacted the other group members via email and shared my name, email, AIM s/n, and google account, and urged everybody to respond back with the same information. I also recommended we utilize google docs for this project, and am adding members of the group to have shared access to the documents. We picked a topic and split up the work: this week I would write the group activity report which was done and submitted by Friday night and we will rotate who writes this every week.

Since the beginning of the project I have done a few things. First I have created a Google group for my teammates. I made sure everyone was invited and had equal rights on the site. This means that they can post new topics or send out emails to the whole group. We are equals in the team after all. I set up page placeholders so that we can all start working on the various documents due that week. I felt that by doing this it would encourage us to start sooner rather than later.

Up to this point, our activities have been mostly collaboratory.

We were all a part of the initial back-and-forth e-mail exchange. We introduced ourselves, started a brainstorm, started thinking about project roles and set up a meeting for Thursday night. During the meeting we chose our topic, discussed and chose project roles, assigned activities for the end of the week and the weekend, and set up our next meeting. Everyone was active in the meeting, too.

This activity report summarizes the progress that I have made this week in regard to the white paper project.

This week, after completing the weekly readings assignments and individual tasks pertaining to white papers, I was introduced to all of my group members via email for this classes final project. We used this opportunity to brainstorm concepts and ideas for white papers that we could create, and eventually decided upon the topic of sustainable energy. Our group felt that this was a topic that we could find plenty of information and sources on, and that through our research we could eventually construct a very strong and informed white paper.

This week, in addition to the reading responses and blog posts that pertained to the project, I spent a lot of time e-mailing with my group and planning out the project. I found three sources dealing with wireless security to contribute to our list of potential sources on Google Docs.

I also spent some time talking with Pat about our proposal and brainstorming about the best way to proceed with a project of this size. We concluded that it’d be easiest if the entire group had a quick “meeting” via AIM or in person (if possible) so we could all be on the same page before doing more work.

This week the group all got introduced via email. We decided that we are going to be using Google Docs in order to share our documents. We also divided up the work load of group activity reports. Since there are four weeks we each took one. I took week fifteen. We also discussed and came up with the topic of wireless security for our white paper subject. As part of my work for the proposal I looked up six different possible sources for our research. All of my sources were on the internet.

My first assignment on this project was the potential sources aspect of the proposal. I wasn’t quite sure what needed to be done for this so I basically just looked up some sources that looked good in terms of research. I know there are many different sources on this subject which is wind turbines for domestic applications. It is one of those subjects that is gaining popularity so there are many different places where you can research and or buy these products. I started looking around using google and found a plethora of sites that involved these turbines.