English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

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

This week I have worked with my team members to organize a work schedule for how we plan to tackle this project. Some of the aspects we covered include general best practices for collaborative work, the structure of our brainstorming sessions and meetings, and workload division. As this is the beginning stage of the project, I have spent much time researching potential topics and bouncing ideas off my group members. After recently covering the issue of a lack of collaboration in the work environment in my Global IT course, I suggested we use this as a basis for this project. After we all agreed, I began researching what the true collaboration problem was and why it is a problem.

For the proposal, we’ve elected to draft individual portions and bring them together as a whole. Each team member was responsible for a paragraph that covered the portion he chose, and submitting it to the Google Group that Jeff had created for our team. Each member is reviewing the work of one another and later we will meet to bring it all together. I was responsible for drafting the introduction of our proposal. The introduction outlines the premise of our white paper, which suggests that the lack of collaboration in modern business environments is a problem, discusses why it is a problem, and offers an assortment of potential, unbiased solutions.

As of now, everyone in my team has submitted his individual portion to the Google Group and we are independently reviewing each paragraph. Once each review is complete, we will meet over AIM to discuss which changes are necessary and then draft the final proposal. It has proven difficult trying to arrange times that we can all meet, but I am confident that we will have the proposal finished by 8 P.M. EST.