Main focus of today’s class was on copyright issues, this stemmed from a post done in response to the previous assignment by “Timmy Tim Tim”. Questions on ethical principles, and violation of copyright laws were raised. We were urged to think of the legal implications of copyright infringements.  We also learn from the professor that copyright had a time limit of between 70 to 90 years, after which the material is no longer protected.  We were reminded of sites like googlebooks.com, and howstuffworks.com as some of  the ways in which technical writing is changing.

Professor Gold instructs us to read chapters  1 and 2 from "Here comes everybody" for next class in preparation for 1-line summary on each chapter. This was reiterated at end of class.

We discussed the purposes of the websites that were submitted as recommendations to be added to the page-cast. Professor Gold proposed a voting system to be used for selecting the websites will be added. Websites like howstuffworks.com is a typical example of this change in technical writing.

We were instructed to defined the term gadget and become members of a bookmarking website named delicious.com.   Professor Gold gave us a practical overview of how the site works and its advantages, making special mention of the need to narrowing our bookmarks based upon topic, interest, and grouping. He also instructs us to use “advtechwriting”  as a common tag  on our delicious.com pages.

Special mention was made of ways of  avoiding  dark background in our blog posts, for improving readability due to cut and paste from word documents. Lastly, we were urged to continue the process of choosing topics for technical writing assignment to be given in the next class. Suggestions were that we focus on procedures, outlining manufacturing process, or instructional informaton on something that is of interest to us.

 Assignment  - Read  chapters  1 and 2 from "Here comes everybody."