English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

Date: April 17, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Group 2
Subject: Group 2 Activity Report – Week 14

I started to research how beneficial open source solutions would be for a school. I was aimed at looking at some figures. What I discovered was spidertoos.com. Here this website for Linux training experts has an article about the cost savings. With the current economical times and the want to reduce costs this could be a key focus in our white paper as to why to switch to open source. One of the focuses of the article is to use Open Office instead of Microsoft Office.

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.

In this next blog entry, I'd like to focus in on more of the statistical facts that I've collected via research into horizontal closed-loop systems. I think that such data will be pertinent to the usability and immediate credibility of any information that our white paper provides, and that it is completely necessary for us to achieve our desired project outcome. In researching statistics, I planned to gather data that would meet our main objective of informing the primary audience, the contractor, on the appropriate heat pump system for any given scenario.

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.

My research lead me to find an article by Computerworld. This article focuses on some of the differences between Open Office and Microsoft Office. I discovered that Open Office does not have the “Ribbon” that Microsoft Office has. This isn’t a large concern however since the “Ribbon” that they are referring to is they design of Microsoft Office 2007. Since we are focusing on a schools using open source, there is a high chance that schools aren’t using Microsoft 2007. This means that the “Ribbon” isn’t a large concern.

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.

For my last research blog I decided to try and find some of the benefits of using domestic wind turbine technology. This was harder than it seemed because I couldn’t really find a source that did not seem biased towards using wind turbines no matter what. Also most of the sources I found had slightly differing information. I finally settled on a couple of websites that I felt had a decent amount of information.
http://www.awea.org/faq/rsdntqa.html
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/09/18/micro.turbine/index.html

For my second research blog I decide to find out what was actually required to be able to have a wind turbine for domestic use. I found all of this information from two different websites.
http://greennav.wordpress.com/2008/04/02/understanding-domestic-wind-power/
http://windpowergeneratorshome.com/

For my first research blog I decide to find out about the cons of domestic wind turbine use. Since we need to present both sides of the argument I thought that this could be used as its own section within the white paper. The information I found was from http://www.eejitsguides.com/environment/domestic-turbines.html.