English 421: Technical Writing

Our white paper began to take shape this week.  On Tuesday, we began working on our annotated bibliography.  Each of us choose two to three sources from those we had previously found and wrote a short annotation for them.  In addition, Andy worked on the conclusion and Tianyi assembled the final document.  Due to an error in the setup of our Sosius folder, we were not able to use this collaboration tool.  However, we communicated back and forth through email on Wednesday and Thursday, which worked fairly well.  I know that I was easily able to rely edited information to Tianyi to insert into the final draft.  However, if the tasks had been more integrated or the communication more complex, email would not have been a good medium to use; making sure that edits were made to the most recent draft would have been a majore issue.  Sosius provides the ability to check out a document so that collaborators know when someone else is editing a shared document.  Therefore, we corrected the folder setup so that we can use it for future drafting and reduce future confusion.

In class on Thursday, we outlined our white paper and divided the portions amoung the group members.  Andy is working on the introduction (i.e. what is Web 2.0 and what problems our posed by collaboration), Cody will demonstrate how Sosius solves some of these issues, and Tianyi will show how Track My People and When is Good meet needs Sosius cannot.  Each group member will write his draft and upload it to our Sosius folder by Monday at noon so that I will be able to write a coherent conclusion as my portion of the initial draft by class on Tuesday.