English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

Date: April 5, 2009
To: Jeremy Tirrell, Instructor
From: Joe Davies, Group 5
Subject: Individual Activity Report 1

This week I did my best to help the group get started on our project. During the first few days we wanted to brainstorm a few ideas for a topic, so I took a look at http://www.bitpipe.com/ and other resources to see what might be feasible. The main page gives several popular topics, and I suggested about four of them that were of interest to me.

The first week of the group white paper project focused mainly on getting acquainted with the assignment and the group. We decided rather early on that we would split the major deliverables up, with each one of us being primarily responsible for one aspect of the project. A Google Docs account was created for our group to use, and we have already begun to utilize it by adding to, editing, and commenting on our initial proposal. We are also looking into ways to send messages through Google Docs so out inboxes will not become overly cluttered with emails back and forth.

During the first week of the White Paper Project, I took the responsibility to initiate productivity. By sending out an email and compiling a list serve of my group, I was able to get thoughts exchanged between members. Having past teamwork experience, it was important to me to see that we got start early and offer a few ideas I already had. I began the first email on Wednesday, April 1st, to organize our team’s responsibilities and get everyone on the same page. I explained what we needed to get done and asked everyone’s opinions before we got started.

Well to start the week off, we had to first communicate to each other and figure out exactly what we wanted to do. Once we started emailing each other, I decided to ask everybody to write out some of their thoughts on what to do for this project. After everyone had replied, I asked them to narrow it down to their top three favorite choices. From there, it was pretty obvious what we were going to end up doing for our project. Pretty much everybody in my group had the cell phone topic in their top three, so we all just decided that we were going to do that topic.

The first week of this project was focused on getting started. I began by participating in discussions over email with the rest of my team. We emailed ideas for the topic of the project to each other. After everyone sent in their feedback, I tallied up the results and discovered that everyone voted for smart phones. This is how we chose our topic.

My primary focus this week was on reading about how to create a successful white paper. I have never written a white paper so I decided I would need this knowledge to help me start the process. I also looked over the example white papers. I used Google to search for a few other examples to make sure that I had a good idea of what I was shooting for. I also contacted my group members early in the week asking if anybody had a topic idea. I shared my contact information with my group members so that we have various ways that we can communicate.

The following is my individual report of work from March 30through April 5.

This week was very busy for me, having two exams, so I was not able to do too much work on the white paper project until Thursday. I began by going over all of the requirements posted on the web site a few times to make sure that our group would not miss any key features as we started to write the paper. On Thursday I contributed some possible topics via emails with my group before we decided to meet in a gmail chat on Thursday night. In the chat, I helped my group narrow down our topic choice to green energy and offered several solutions to the problem we would be focusing on.

Date: April 7, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Jason Flittner, Group 1
Subject: Individual Activity Report 1

This activity report summarizes the steps taken to complete the proposal for the white paper my group has decided to create.

For this week, aside from the normal reading responses and comments, I spent the beginning of the week communicating with my group via email to decide on a topic and how we wanted to divide up the workload. We decided to do the white paper on wireless network security solutions and to use google docs to list the potential sources we found and start work on our project proposal.