English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

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

The majority of the time that I haven’t spent working on this week’s work was dedicated to drafting deliverables. First, the Gantt chart was really a team effort. Jeff had compiled a rough draft and with input from all of us, I compiled the final draft. This chart outlines, with approximate deadlines, the preparation and progression schedule that we anticipate for this white paper project.

This week I looked at how we could narrow down our broad audience. I realized that the scope of my group’s white paper was too broad. It would be impractical for us to cover the whole range of schools in our paper on open source instead of Microsoft products. I helped in deciding that we would focus on a smaller audience to help make our white paper more effective. This much necessary narrowing of our white paper will allow us to create a much more effective paper. I was in charge of writing this week’s group activity report. I also began researching for our white paper.

Once again this week my group discussed how we were going to divide up the work for this week through emails and through Microsoft Office Live. We briefly discussed what we wanted for the Gantt chart and divided up who was going to do what. I decided that my main role in the Gantt chart would be to revise and edit it. Once it was posted on the office live website, I took a look at it and after a few minutes I came up with several different ideas about changing it.

Date: April 12, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Brian O’Leary, Group 2
Subject: Individual Activity Report 2

This activity report accounts for the progress I have made from April 6th to April 12th

Week 13 was focused on deciding how to break up the work for the project and how to approach the audience issue. On Monday, I initiated an AIM chat for everyone to meet and discuss their concerns and desires for this project.

This week went rather well for our group. We were able to identify that we need to refine our identification audience and have gone about identifying our specific audience type for our white paper. Via the responses from our instructor we were able to identify that we will need to research some alternate technologies along with the main technology we will be focusing on. I am happy that we were able to complete the Gantt chart and assign everyone portions of the work that needs to be completed, this will certainly help to keep things on track throughout the next couple of weeks.

This week our group narrowed our topic choices down to a comparison of routers designed for home networking. After identifying our subject area and audience, I was able to find three popular router options in the $40 - $60 price range that our group will be researching. These include the D-Link DIR-615, the Netgear WGR614, and the Linksys WRT54G2.

This week was a lot easier than what I did last week. Since I had some free time I worked on our gantt chart. While I was working on it I looked at the schedule to what we have due for the next couple of weeks. I then told my teammates about it through an email saying I would submit it later if they had any changes they felt were necessary. Ten thirty P.M. came around and I did not receive any emails from my teammates with changes so I submitted it to the English 421 website and called it a night.

The second week of working on the white paper project was an awakening for our group. The first thing we had to decide was what to do about the direction of our project. The first proposal didn’t meet the requirements and we would have to make a large overhaul to have it work. The group all came to the conclusion to pick a totally different topic. We decided to pick comparing/contrasting different web browsers (Opera, Firefox, IE) in an small IT company/department setting. After picking the new topic, research was divided among group members.

This week's tasks for ENGL421 began with the reading assignment and response concerning research. This reading was very relevant to our groups white paper project as our research will begin shortly, and individual research blogs, tracking this effort, will also be due in a matter of time. For my portion of the group's research, I've decided to focus in on an online approach. This seems quite fitting for this course, as it is online, but I think it will also be the most efficient and accurate way for me to gather information.