English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

This week I helped make some final decisions regarding the audience. Last week we all came up with the best possible sources for our audience between general lawmakers to the general population. I suggested we use the American Federal Lawmakers as our audience, specifically the Secretary of Energy. The rest of the group agreed that this would be our primary audience.

The following is my individual report of work from April 13 through April 19.

This week has been another step in the right direction of completing our white paper. Overall most of my time this week was spent researching the problems associated with the current methods of providing power. These topics included problems with the common types of power production and the inherent problems with the current power infrastructure. This research will be used to help establish a need for wind turbines.

In week fourteen, the students had to complete several tasks relative to the White Paper Project. At the beginning of the week, I was mainly responsible for our white paper thumbnail. I used several suggested items from the examples offered on the course website. Utilizing all of the space and inserting special locations for text boxes and graphics, my thumbnail design was optimal for what our group was explaining.

Ahh this week included more research!

Well as our team figured out we must locate more information on software and services that are similar to Microsoft's SharePoint. We did identify and dive into a couple of these, including GoogleApps and EMC Documentum. I found that Each of the technologies has its strengths and weaknesses. These features good and bad must be described in our whitepaper in order to accurately present the information we are attempting to portray.

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

For this week's tasks related to the final group project, I focused my attention on creating a document thumbnail and completing research. In creating the document thumbnail, my goal was to outline a structure for our white paper that I felt would be appropriate. I used many of the example white papers provided by the instructor as a guiding source. In viewing these examples, I noticed several consistencies which I carried over into my design. First, I made sure to take proper advantage of white space.

This week in general has been a very busy one for me, both for this class and in work. Besides the normal workload of reading the assigned readings and writing our responses, there was also a lot that my group had to do for this week.

Whew, this week has been busy. For the project this week I researched all sorts of information and have posted some of my findings in three different blogs. The types of research included total cost of ownership (TCO) of both open source and Microsoft software, and case studies of small schools that are using open source. The best resource I've found so far is the study that compares Microsoft products to OSS equivalents in almost every conceivable way.

This week was a big week on our project. I designed a thumbnail for our group, which was frustrating for me, because I struggle with formatting in Microsoft Word. I hate that the lines never go where I want them to go, and usually just use InDesign, but I wanted to stay in Word since I knew it was probable that my group members wouldn't necessarily have this program at their disposal. In the end, we chose to use InDesign, and did incorporate a few elements of my thumbnail into our final version.

This week was mainly devoted to research. I did a lot of searching to find a few different types of wind turbines and ended up using three of them on my research blogs. I even watched some video clips about them being used by famous people. I saw that Jay Leno was putting one of them on top of his garage. I thought was good because Jay can afford all the electricity he wants but he would rather “go green” by using solar, as well as wind power. I found that with the combination of the two he doesn’t even use any electricity from the grid most of the year.