Since our last blog our group has met 2 times and finished the project. We met on Monday and Wednesday.
Monday we met at the Stewart Center library and outlined our brochure and information cards. We had some very good information from the Banks of the Wabash’s website and some other fliers that our client gave to us. We used these sources to put together our brochure.
Since last week we have met three times. The first meeting was to contact the Immediate Task President of The Banks of the Wabash to insure we could collaborate with them for our project. He was very excited about working with us on the project.
This week we got started on our final project, the client-based service learning project. Because we are just starting this project a lot of the readings for the week were about the first few group deliverables, the memo and proposal. I thought that the OWL's guidelines for writing a memo was very helpful for our group. We used it throughout the whole process of putting together our memo. It had a lot of useful tips and advice that helped walk us through each part of the memo. It also had a sample memo which gave us an opportunity to see what a memo should look like.
This week we did not have any assigned readings, but we did do a lot of peer reviewing that turned out to be quite beneficial. I think that the peer review process is a great idea that gives everyone insightful feedback and leads to well-written papers. From the peer review process every group is able to gain a lot of knowledge. They are able to look at examples of papers that their classmates are doing and maybe use some of the ideas in their own paper.
We did the remaining editing to our paper tonight (3/6) and are satisfied with our final draft that we are going to turn in tomorrow. This week I was unable to attend a group meeting because of a conflict with my work schedule, but I was able to still meet up with Justin in the library last night (3/5) and we got some editing done then. I feel that as a group we have been able to work well. All our meetings have all been consistently about 2 hours and we are able to get a lot done in the meetings.
This week we didn't really have any readings, but I found the white paper example we looked at in class to be very helpful. The example gave me a better idea of what the white paper project was supposed to look like. It also was somewhat of an outline for our group's white paper. We liked the general format of the paper and some of its key elements.
This week we finished the rough draft for our project. The rough draft went a little smoother than I thought that it would. This probably is because we spent a lot of time on making our outline as detailed as possible. This ended up paying off for us because we were able to take almost everything off the outline and just plug it into the paper.
The design of the paper was probably the biggest challenge we faced. We took a little while to come up with a title that we thought would fit the paper best.
This week I went and rented two movies to watch that are associated with our topic. The two movies that I picked up were "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" and the Frontline feature "Is Wal-Mart Good for America?" So far I have only been able to watch the Frontline documentary. The documentary spent almost all of its time focusing on two key points.
I found some of the articles from this week to be pretty interesting as we are getting started on the white paper project. I found most of the articles in the "Managing Projects" section on PWOnline to be helpful. The articles gave a bunch of tips on how to make working in a group as painless as possible. It talks about having a strong team work structure a lot. As a group everyone needs to have the same dedication to the finished product in order for it to turn out the way you want.
Illegal immigration is a huge problem in the United States. Coming from California, it is on the news everyday and it seems like nothing is being done. Granted there always is going to be a great influx of immigrants coming across the border illegally. However, we could consider making it easier for them to become citizens, which would allow us to tax them.