One of the key points that I took away from this chapter is making effective use of your research. I realized while reading this that our group had chosen a rather large audience in our original proposal. I think that by narrowing this down to something smaller would allow us to find research that is more specific. I think we should focus our white paper on a small middle school. This would be the optimal environment. The fact that they would have a limited amount of resources makes an open source solution perfect. This will greatly cut the costs for the school by going with free software instead of expensive Microsoft solutions.
I will focus my research on finding concrete examples of the cost of open source software compared to Microsoft software. I expect that the cost the schools must endure will be much less for those who implement open source solutions. The open source solutions are free which means most of the cost is in hardware and implementation. This is different from the costly Microsoft solutions where the users must pay to receive a license and on top of that must still pay for the hardware and implementation.
I like the idea of using note cards while researching. This allows me to think about my sources and what I have found. It makes me really think about what I just found instead of just adding it to a list of sources and thinking about it later. When documenting by recording sources in a word document I find that I often don’t think enough about how the information can help me. I tend to just add the web address to my list and then later think about its uses. This is where summarizing the research will help me. I plan use the idea of summarizing each of my sources to know quickly which of my sources contained the information that I was looking for.
Note Cards?
I understand the purpose of using note cards, and I think it's a good idea, but do you plan on writing them out by hand, or do you know of some kind of program that could be used to organize them? Since we'll be doing our research online anyway, it seems like it would make more sense to type out the important information that we find. If you write it down on a note card, eventually you'll have to type it out anyway. However, if you type it out while you research, you can copy/paste it later. The only idea that I have right now is to try Microsoft OneNote. It comes with Microsoft Office 2007 (the one sold by the Boiler Copy Shop, at least), and it looks like students can even access it through the Purdue DACS. The pages can be custom formatted to any size you want, and you can order the cards as you like. Now that I think about it, I think the same could be done in PowerPoint. If you know of another program, let me know. I just want to avoid hand-written notes.
Hand written = Remember
I completely understand why many people see note cards as out dated and don’t want to do their research this way. I however remember what I am recording much better if I hand write it. It makes me think more about what I am taking note of. This makes it easier for me to then think about all of the sources and research that I have found. I can then easily start planning how and where I am going to incorporate each piece of the research because I still remember what I have found. It really comes down to what works for you. I’ll check out the Microsoft OneNote. After all, it may be so great I change my ways.
-Chris
Choose the right audience
I too, after reading my instructor feedback and thinking more deeply about our subject, had to go back and change the scale of the audience for my group’s proposal. At first I just thought that our subject would have a massive audience range, going from teenagers all the way to grandparents. But, after reading my instructor feedback, I realized that the range of our proposal was drastically smaller. The main point that he proved was that many of us had never seen a white paper, and this was due to the fact that they are not written towards us and are mainly written towards a decision maker who is trying to make a large scale order, such as for a business or corporation. One of the most important aspects of this project is going to be choosing the right audience.
Broad Audience
My group also has too broad of an audience and we are working and using research to get a more specific category of the audience. Right now, we are leaning toward a government official or American Federal Legislator as our main audience because these people effectively have a large impact on the outcome of our proposal/white paper. We are looking at the head of the Department of Energy and trying to pin down specific names. Personally, I am going to do some research on past similar proposals and see who the audience was for those and what the outcome was. This way, I can have an idea of what to make sure not to do in the final white paper.
That is exactly what our
That is exactly what our group did as well, we too chose a very broad audience at first and had to change our proposal. I think the entire class had the wrong idea of a white paper in the beginning, because nearly everyone initially though that it was to be written for the general public. I really like your idea of using note cards, I too like to use not card when researching, it helps to keep me more organized. I am very bad about finding my sources, and getting the information, and then not remembering what source it came from, so this time I will use note card for each source.
Researching audiences
It seems that a lot of groups had trouble with the size of their audience. According to the instructor feedback for my group’s proposal, our audience was too big. Narrowing it down to something more specific has not been easy to accomplish. Our project deals with solutions to oil-dependence, and initially we chose government officials as our audience. Our group has been using several research techniques to narrow this down. We’ve been doing research to find which federal departments specifically are in charge of energy policies, and who specifically in those departments are the key decision-makers that would benefit from our white paper.