English 420, Business Writing

We had our white paper presentation last Monday. I feel we did a good job explaining our different ways of implementing new communication technologies into Knight Corporation. Our presentation had to be cut short because of time constraints so Robert wasn't able to finish his part of the presentation or show his video on social networking. The rest of the week, we watched other group presentations and attempted to get the group together to work on the final copy of the white paper.

On Monday we had to present our final presentation. The presentation went very well but, we were unable to finish it as time ran out. We did not have any technological difficulties, but we could not show our video. Robert was discussing the advanced level of technologies and had to stop the video describing social networking. Also, since we were cut short Robert did not talk about our online sales option either.

On Wednesday we had our group meetings in class. During this meeting we asked questions about our white paper and came across one main problem in our writing. We were all having problems relating each type of technology back to how it will benefit Knight Corporation. This is a big part of the white paper and we plan on working on that in our white paper revision. Another problem with our white paper was that it was lacking transitions. We were just ending one technology and diving into the next without transitioning between the two.

The Wednesday before spring break we met and brought all of our parts together and went through to make sure formatting was the same for all parts then we combined them all into our rough draft. Our rough draft was over the word limit so we will need to go through and see what parts can be rewritten or taken out to put us in the word limit for the paper. Also, we to go through and put some pictures into the paper so Knight Corporation can have a visual to what we are talking about in our white paper.

I was pretty happy with our technology presentation on GarageBand. During the explanation of parts and examples of what you can do in the program most of the class seemed to be fairly interested. On Wednesday we also worked on the rest of our White Paper rough draft. All of us had written our parts out so this meeting was mostly just to throw everything together and come up with a format for the entire thing. We also decided to move some things around from our original outline.

Our technology presentation seemed to go very well last Wednesday. I feel that our podcast example effectively grabbed the attention of the class. That night, the group got together to work on the rough draft of the white paper. Unfortunately I was not able to be there to help, but the group was able to keep in contact with me via instant messenger. I was able to help edit some things and write a few additions to the paper and send them to the group. Joe turned the paper in on Friday. That is pretty much the gist of what I recall before spring break.

On Wednesday night, March 5, the group met up to work on the rough draft of the white paper project. Brad could not make it to the meeting because he had to work at one of the computer labs. However, we kept Brad updated with what changes we were making to the white paper through Instant Messenger.

At our group meeting we decided to break up the paper into parts. I have started doing research and taking notes on what I have found for my part of the paper and should be able to type out my part fairly quickly. I have found a program by IBM that allows people to collaborate with each other. Workers can post work, write blogs, and even IM each other.It is also customizable so the company can change it to meet it's current needs.

We got together on Tuesday last week to work on the white paper. We ended up splitting the white paper up so that each person had about a quarter of the project to write about. We also met Thursday to talk about how everything was going to fit together as far as transitions. Overall, we are splitting up the paper into how much change needs to be done to implement a certain plan. Then each plan will be split into benefits or pros/cons, cost, and descriptions of the parts that need to be put into place.

This week I feel that we got a lot accomplished. We met last week to put together our technology presentation to start outlining our white paper. We divided up the workload for the white paper because we realized that it would be tough to find time to meet with our conflicting schedules. I have a few pages typed up for my rough draft and have an idea of what I can add / take away from it after receiving feedback and input from Mr. Hannah on Thursday. I also put together a simple "example podcast" for our technology presentation.