English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

2nd Individual Activity Report
For: Professor Rivers
From: Chris Kirkwood

During week 12 our group began preparing and planning for our project. We brainstormed ideas for our audience and created a chronological schedule to help us track the life cycle of the project. The group worked on delegating different functions of the project out to individuals and some as group functions. Following this we all reviewed our schedule of tasks, which was organized in a gantt chart.

This week was another uneventful week in terms of getting things done for this project. I had spent a majority of this week in Daytona Beach partaking in the NCA Cheerleading National Competition. I briefly did some research on our topic while in Florida. There was some talk about narrowing down our audience for this project but I didn't participate in that very much. The group chose to target small not for profit organizations as our audience, but like I said I did not participate in these discussions.

Our white paper project seemed to really take shape and get off the ground during this past week. Last week, we deciding upon a topic and established a general definition of our audience. We chose solutions to America’s oil dependence, focusing on sustainable energy sources and smart grid technologies. Initially, our audience was defined as “American political leaders”. The instructor feedback from our initial proposal suggested that this was vague and too broad for the sake of this project.

Once again, there was not editing to be done on the final project, so I didn't have much to do for that role. I continued to focus instead on trying to organize a plan for our content.

Last Sunday, I created a content outline for our initial topic, energy saving solutions, and posted it on Google Docs. The outline was the primary tool for deciding a direction for and delegating our research in our meeting last Sunday. I also initiated a "contacts" document for our group last weekend.

In my initial research efforts, my goal has been not necessarily to find information to include in the white paper itself, but to look for information that will help me proceed with my research. Our white paper will compare three web browsers for an IT department that is trying to choose one of them for use on its company's computers. Before doing the research on each of the browsers, we wanted to determine what current concerns of IT professionals are that would affect their browser decisions.

Here is my sample thumbnail.

On Sunday last week, I participated in our group chat during which we created our Gantt chart and set out a plan for how to divide our solutions. I volunteered to cover the introduction/problem for our White Paper.

Monday started with the group needing to renegotiate our proposal a bit. I participated in these e-mail conversations and e-mailed our re-proposed problems and solutions to our instructor.

This week was spent researching the functions and operation of the Opera web browser. I’ve used Opera in the past so I was somewhat familiar with its functionality, but knew there was a lot more to learn based on the needs of our project.

Date: April 12, 2009
To: Professor Rivers
From: Isaac Townsend, Group 1
Subject: Individual Activity Report 2

This activity report accounts for the work and progress I have made from April 5th to April 12th.

I set up the meeting we had planned for last week. We meet and layout out tasks and responsibilities for the coming weeks. I also filled in one of our group members who was unable to meet due to class conflicts. I wanted to make sure he knew his responsibilities, as long as what he should expect from the rest of the group.