My technical instructions will cover how to install Ubuntu as a virtual machine. Ubuntu is an alternative operating system to windows. My primary audience will be a user who is new to Ubuntu who wants to try a new operating system. Installing Ubuntu as a virtual machine is a good option because you do not have to destroy your current OS to try Ubuntu. My secondary audience will be a more advance user who is interested in cutting costs by running Ubuntu as a virtual machine on a computer they already have instead of having two separate computers. For the advanced user I will include how to run a web server on Ubuntu. Instructions are necessary because this can be a very confusing process for someone who has never worked with virtual machines or Ubuntu before. I will be able to write good instructions for this because I have a computer running Ubuntu and I have used virtual machines in my courses here at Purdue. I plan on presenting my instructions in website format to allow the ability to jump to different sections easily.
Instructor Feedback: Chris
For this proposal to be of value to you (as a concrete starting point for this project), it needs to include much more than it currently does. First, it is unclear whether you intend to produce, per the project description, two sets of instructions for two primary audiences. Second, you need to more fully articulate the differences between the audiences in terms of their expertise, needs, values, and expectations. Third, you need to describe how the instructions will be designed and composed in response to these two audiences not just in terms of information but also, and importantly, in terms of the design, the arrangement of information, the word choice, the phrasing, and the tone. In other words, you need a specific and concrete plan for meeting the needs, expectations, and values of two distinct audiences.
It is vitally important to your project's success that you produce two clearly distinct instruction sets. The worry here is that the difference between the two will be one of degree (that is, the expert set will simply be a truncated version of the novice set); we are expecting a difference in kind (the expert set should be qualitatively different from the novice set). Be sure you are able to differentiate the two sets in this way.