English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

During week 12 of this project I began by researching how to create a gantt chart, as I was tasked with this. I had a copy of Microsoft Project, so I chose to use it to make the chart. After reviewing the calendar, the group decided which activities were going to be accomplished individually, and those that would be done as a group. I used this information to create the chart, and followed the submission deadlines posted on the calendar.

This week our group made significant progress with our white paper project. We began by constructing a thoroughly thought-out Ghantt chart. In doing this, our main goal was to distribute the various tasks evenly between all of the members, and also plan out a course of action. These tasks were divided between the five weeks available for the project, namely weeks 12 thru 16. The first week was focused on the project proposal, while the current week was focused on the construction of a Ghantt chart and the outlining of a research plan.

Our group meeting was once again very productive. The agenda was mainly focused on fixing our proposal to correctly meet the project requirements. We also focused on splitting up the work load between group members in order to give everyone a fair share. The group definitely fell into stride by the end of the meeting, with everyone knowing exactly what they should be doing/working on.

After this week, week 13, our group is making great progress toward our White Paper project. This week mainly concentrated on making the gnatt chart as well as researching and combining our thoughts on our topic. Also, we have divided up the how the research was going to broken up.

In concluding this week, it feels as though we’ve completed the second milestone of our project, and an important milestone it was. Having elected to propose both how and why the lack of collaboration negatively affects small organizations in the first milestone, much of the work this week was spent preparing how to tackle covering the topic.

This week for Group 8 was a productive one. On Monday we all met in a chat room via AIM. There we discussed how we wanted to approach the project. We had found that our audience for our white paper needed a more specific audience. In our proposal we stated that our primary audience would be political leaders. We learned that this audience is too broad and needed to be more specific; therefore, we narrowed our primary audience to someone that is in charge of making new policies for energy, such as the Secretary of Energy.

This week my group met online via AOL Instant Messenger on Sunday. Our schedules conflict a lot so I was the odd man out as I had work during this virtual chat meeting. I was caught up to speed that night with email and a document of the entire chat. Our Gantt chart was completed during the meeting. The next day we needed to shift our subject to allow for options to be presented in our paper better. We all decided by email on three different wireless routers to compare. Today I began my research into the D-Link DIR-615 wireless router.

This document summarizes the information that will be used from the website http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833127241 for my white paper project. This website, known as new egg, is a third party supplier of various items including software, cameras, and computers. They have no ties with the manufacturer so they are unbiased. The item I researched is a wireless router from the company D-Link, model DIR-615. I reviewed the specifications for the item on this site that were taken word-for-word from the manufacturers specifications.

Date: April 10, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Group 2
Subject: Group 2 Activity Report – Week 13

For week 2 my group started the week off with a group chat on aim on Sunday. During this meeting we discussed how we wanted to divide up the work for the rest of this project. We decided on how we wanted to divide up the different parts of the white paper as well as who would be responsible for posting any of group documents for the remainder of the project. We decided on what solutions for wireless networking we wanted to include in the white paper, and which group member would be doing the research on each solution.