Digital Tools Blog 7.31.13

Reading Reflections:

Chapter 7: Analyzing Textual Data

 

This chapter was right-on-time for me, as I am working on my second skill builder, a Lit Review in Atlas ti.  This is a new process for me, to work paperless, to construct my argument, to organize my thoughts – all digitally.  Because it is new, I am aware of my focus in two directions – on the content of my lit review (Discursive Psychology), and on writing in/through a new medium, Atlas ti.    It does not feel natural to me to work in this way, yet, but I do see benefits (affordances) and am committed to (in the words of my New Zealand friends) “have a go”. 

 

On page 7, I highlighted the sentence “The initial investment of time and effort required to learn the tools will pay off handsomely over the course of your research career”.  I feel like I have invested considerable time in Atlas – class last semester and all the related projects, attendance in workshops that Ann conducted, individual sessions with Ann, and now expanding my learning with the Lit Review.  Many aspects of Atlas have moved from conscious attention to unconscious attention and do not intimidate me.  I love the organizational features of Atlas – I have all my articles and annotations, blog posts, and other documents housed in an HU on my computer.  I have a “textual laboratory” within Atlas, and I love it (p. 12).  This would amount to files and files of folders and notebooks and scribbled marginal notes if I were working from print – and, who knows how/if all of that information would be effectively managed.   With Atlas, I know where things are, they are readily accessible, and they are NEAT.  When I came to campus this morning, I had to haul my computer…not backpacks full of information.    I can already see the payoff of taking on the new learning.

 

That sentence summarizes what I was talking about with Ann and my small group members last night.  I have invested time, effort, and energy in working with Atlas. I am pleased with what it can do for me, so why would I want to change?  I did go to the NVivo workshop that Ann had this summer.  I did respond positively to the visual display format and the functionality, but I didn’t see anything more it could do for me than Atlas (don’t need to capture social media info).  If I land at a University that uses NVivo, I feel confident that my background in Atlas ti will be useful in helping me learn that tool if and when I need to use it, as there is so much similarity.

 

I downloaded the Atlas ipad app when it first came out.  I wasn’t able to figure out how to move documents into it, so I ended up deleting it from my ipad.  Ann shared last night in class that it is not able to be connected to Atlas on the desktop, so that just validated my decision to delete it and safe my space for something more meaningful.

 

One of the things that is bothering me about Atlas (constraint) is that I can’t look at everything I want to look at, at the same time.  I used to take over the kitchen table too (like Matt), but now I am confined to a laptop screen.  This is a constraint for me, as I find myself clicking all around when what I want to do is see it all at the same time.  I think purchasing an additional monitor (this tax free weekend) will help me very much, as I can move from space to space and have the “kitchen table effect” digitally.

 

On page 18, the authors talk about using the memoing feature to keep a research journal.  In my future research, I think this will be important for me.  I do hope by then the Ipad app is more functional, as I think being able to keep the journal on a smaller device would be helpful for me. It feels somewhat awkward to keep a journal on my laptop – just because of its size.   They also talk about actually beginning to write the lit review using the memoing tool and then moving it over to a word processing program.  I am hoping to practice this with my mini-lit review project in Atlas.

Another affordance in Atlas is the ability to represent the research process (p. 20).  I will be able to keep up with a sequence of events (of PD sessions, teacher visits, and email conversations) as well as show the steps I took (via my reflective journal on Atlas) as a researcher.

ON page 21, the authors talk about software packages affording the following abilities – create and assign codes, retrieve coding data, review coded data in context, rename or delete or merge codes.  I see and have experienced that in my own work.  Even last night in class, I did all of those things with my codes while we were in class.    I do miss the tactile aspect of interacting with pen and paper and highlighter.  I miss not spreading things out on the floor or table.  Thinking is messy work (for me) and working in Atlas does tidy things up (which I like and need) but I also miss the “being in it” feel that all those spread out pieces of paper and tools brings.

 

 

 

Konopaske- Making Thinking Visible with Atlas.ti: Computer Assisted Qualitative Analysis as Textual Practices

 

I do think working with Atlas makes my decisions more visible and transparent.  Working on the skill builder and the lit review simultaneously has forced me to be more “metacognitive” about the whole process.  I find myself thinking about what I am doing because I know I will need to write about it in my skill builder.  And, I am thinking this is a good habit to get into, as when I do research, I will want my readers to get a sense of my process. Just the act of inserting time stamps helps with transparency – when certain decisions were made can be tracked.  I am doing a better job this time around with adding comments as I am working.  I am labeling my codes and memoing along the way.  It doesn’t feel so forced to me – last semester, I really had to “work” to remember to do these things.  Right now, it is taking consider able effort to work in Atlas, as the process is not entirely natural to me, but I think in time it will feel more natural to me and won’t take as much effort – allowing me more resources for analyzing and interpreting the data.

 

I liked this quote – “Once reality is narrated, recorded, and transcribed we can better manipulate it – store, transport, compress, mark, juxtapose to other realities, but into pieces, recompose, reorder, etc.  Only thanks to these manipulations can we see (and show) differences and similarities, emerging patterns, new contexts” (p. 4). I am hoping to get to this place in my use of Atlas.  I remember how much it took for me to make the leap from writing by hand to writing on a computer.  That seems really silly now when I think about it, but I recall it being difficult.  The computer changed how I wrote and what I wrote (I wrote more remotely, distantly, and carefully) as opposed to my hand writing – which was closer to “me”, I felt.   I see a similar thing happening with reading and annotating now, as I am trying to go paperless.  My comprehension is not as good as I am learning the process of interacting with text digitally.

 

I also liked this quote about the textual laboratory – “Because data are also everything that we strive to put on one place, on one table. Or, more exactly, into a single textual laboratory – which has the power to shrink time and space distances between observable phenomena so that everything important is present and under control” (p. 8).   I like how he talked about the aspect of “time travel” thorough information over time with simple “clicks”.  It is true, and I suppose I never thought of it that way.

Another quote about an affordance – p11 – “In memos we integrate partial observations.  The integration is not just an abstract mental operation.  It corresponds with the ability of memos to be attached to several codes, quotations and other memos at once.  We can therefore imagine memos as embryo-paragraphs or pages of a future research report, already well-founded in empirical data and embedded in a broader argument (in the structure of other memos).

 

“Atlas.ti provides an interface in which and through which we do thinking” (p.16).

 

Class reflections:

I wove some of my reflections into my comments about the readings.  But, I will say, for me as a learner, it is much better for me to be IN class (instead of Skype).  I like the face to face interaction (even with skype some of the nonverbal stuff is lost) and side conversations that happen spontaneously, and are important.  With walking through something as complex as Atlas, I think I would have been really lost had I skyped last night.  It was overwhelming, even being there live, but I think it would have been more problematic virtually.

Discursive Psychology Blog Post 7.30.13

Questions for Elizabeth

• ·How did you get access to IEP meetings within school districts?  Did you have prior relationships and connections?
• ·         Why 20?  Why 7/7? (what were your final numbers?)
• ·         How did your timeline for completion compare to what actually occurred?
• ·         How did keeping a reflexive journal and meeting with the DART team influence your work and this study? Did they “push back” against your understandings as you had hoped?
• ·         You said in class that it didn’t feel right to you (didn’t feel DPish) to do a comparison of groups.  Did you do that comparison, and if so, are you pleased you constructed the study in this manner?

Questions for Joshua

• ·         Can you talk a bit about transcription of a group interaction?  I have only transcribed one to one interviews and imagine that trying to capture group dynamics is very complex.
• ·         Did you keep a reflexive journal or interact with others to analyze your data (like the DART team Elizabeth talks about)?
• ·         How do you think you did with staying away from the “common failures” of discourse analysis – summarizing, taking sides, over or under quoting, reasoning circularly, attributing membership categories, spotting features?
• ·         Your position in the group was interesting.  What did you find out about your own interactions and discourse?
• ·         You talked about the teacher’s different characterizations/labeling of themselves (and expecting that to be focal for the participants) – language arts teachers, English teachers etc. – was that relevant in your study?  To your participants.

Questions for either/both:

• ·         How do you decide when to use Jeffersonian transcription?  After you have become familiar with the findings and are beginning to determine what is most salient?

Discursive Psychology 7.28.13

 Discourse and Social Psychology (p. 94-187) – Potter and Wetherell

Chapter 5 – Self

It is so hard to get past traditional views of the self.  I suppose this is particularly hard for me because of my background in psychology, where both trait and role views of the self are central, and humanistic views of the self are included.  Trait theory is what Paula Deen was relying on when she said that people who were “talking bad about her” didn’t know her and when she told stories about her family. In telling her family stories, she was trying to show her “self” as a static individual who has always been the same and couldn’t possibly hurt others.  This conception of the self is also what the Myers Briggs is attempting to capture with its distinctions between introverts and extraverts, those who sense and those who are intuitive, feelers and thinkers, and judgers and perceivers.   This quote on page 98 about role theory stood out to me … “Like the actor on the stage, a person’s actions are not expressive of a unique personality, but expressive of their role, and most individuals are interchangeable when it comes to role playing.”  I do think people act in certain ways because of the roles they play – for me, those would be grad student, daughter, friend, and consultant, and I think there is some common ground between all those acting within the constraints of those various roles.  I can’t, however, buy the second part of that sentence – that individuals are interchangeable.  I need to think some more about that… I guess my views of the self are most closely connected to the humanistic view of the self – which is summarized on page 100, “There is the role being acted out and there is the actor’s real self, which guides the performance and, in some sense, remains removed and alienated from the part being played.”  This has been my assumption for most of my life, and only with this course and these readings have I begun to consider an alternative view.

There is a lot in Gergen’s view of the self that I can appreciate – I like the terms “language based approaches to the self” and “a discursive model of the self”, as much of what we do and how we interact is through our language.  I agree with every part of this definition from page 102, “There is not ‘one’ self waiting to be discovered or uncovered but a multitude of selves found in the different kinds of linguistic practices articulated now, in the past, historically, and cross culturally.”  

This quote on page 104, also stood out to me – “The methods of conceptualizing the self involved in different linguistic practices have vital consequences for the positioning of people in society; they are not neutral or without impact, they produce senses of the self which may be negative, destructive, oppressive, as well as senses which might change and liberate”.

As I was reading this view of the self, I was reminded of a quote from Montaigne (college freshman philosophy class) – that goes something like this… I do not portray being, I portray passing.  My history is adapted to the moment. I may presently change, not only by fortune, but by intention.  If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.

I feel like much of what I have “assumed” to be true is up for debate now. Interesting that the authors talk about the first step in DA is to be able to suspend beliefs and assumptions that we take for granted.  That is a pretty difficult thing to do!

I am really curious about why so much of this research was done in New Zealand (Aotearoa – “land of the long white cloud”) and on the Maori people. Reading Recovery came from New Zealand, and Marie Clay and Courtney Cazden did a great deal of work together in NZ.  I am just so curious about all of these connections.  As I read about the Maori culture, I was reminded of my experiences there when I visited there. Add the movie, Whale Rider, to our growing list – it is all about Maori culture.

Chapter 6 – Categories

I feel like I have talked a great deal in my previous blog posts about the idea of categories/labels in education and how bothered I am by them.  I agree with the authors when they discussed the benefit of categories – we can organize and simplify things, and we have common language to understand and communicate, especially in particular fields.  There are so many things in Reading Recovery that we have particular names for, and “we” RR people understand (but people not familiar with RR wouldn’t understand).  I think I am bothered by categories when it comes to applying them to people. My example last post about the kindergarten teacher and the “autistic” child is a typical one – where a teacher (a very well-meaning teacher) responds to the label and not to the child.   I thought the example on page 117 (with the dots on the tv screen) was a really good one – what you see, how you see, is influenced by the category/label you apply.  Students with learning disabilities in reading are treated in particular ways by teachers.  And often, these ways are not very helpful to their academic growth in reading.

Chapter 7 – from representation to repertoires

I was glad we had read the Gilbert and Mulkey article before reading this chapter.  The chapter was a nice review.  Again, I was reminded of the whole phonics vs. whole language debate in reading, with both camps using some of the features of the contingent repertoire (listed on page 151) to undermine the views of “the other side”.   I happen to be right in the middle on this one – kids need phonics and they need lots of authentic reading and writing to learn to read (and this, I believe is true of all kids – whether you are labeled as LD or not).

I thought “the truth will out device” was really interesting. And, I can think of times when I have heard people use this device as a way to conclude an argument or shut down a discussion – “Well, we are going to due this scripted reading program for a few years and then we will find out.  Time will tell.”  When people do this, it shuts down the discussion of the present and puts off any further debate.  On page 155, the authors say, “The TWOD allows this version to be maintained while at the same time giving the speaker leeway to apply the contingent repertoire to a wide range of persons, events, and even whole scientific fields.”

Chapter 8 – How to analyze discourse

I thought this chapter was great to read before we read the two dissertation proposals for Wednesday.  We will have a framework of sorts to use to think through what Price and Johnston proposed.    I think it will be helpful for me to take a few notes on the various sections and comment as I go.

Stage one: research questions

-          Varied questions asked in DA

-          Discourse is examined for its own sake – not as something that represents something else. 

-          “action oriented medium”

-          “The concern is exclusively with talk and writing itself and how it can be read, not with descriptive acuity”

-          Question – how is discourse put together and what is gained by this construction. “To summarize – our research questions give priority to discourse, in any form, and ask about its construction in relation to its function.”

Stage two: sample selection

-          Labor intensive approach (DA)

-          Reading and rereading

-          Success of a study is not dependent on sample size

-          “The crucial determinant of sample size, however, must be, here as elsewhere, the specific research question.”

(Comment: I am thinking about the article I read for my critique and how he looked at change over time in identity development.  I am wondering if I could look at a child’s Reading Recovery lesson series- 20 weeks max- and look at how some aspect of the teacher/child interaction changes.  Maybe it is the child’s identity, or the child’s independent action, or the language exchanges between teacher and child – more directive and controlled at the beginning, and more child driven at the end.  So many options.).

Stage three:

-          Work with records and documents of interaction (not about the researcher interactions).

-          Transcripts that happen between participants (not researcher generated)

-          “ … you can use people’s own ability to artfully (and very helpfully) poke holes in each others’ positions to reveal their constructed nature.”

-          Need high quality recording device.

Stage four:

-          “interviews have the virtue of allowing the researcher room for active intervention”

-          “enable the researcher to deliberately question an entire sample of people on the same issue, giving greater comparability in responses, and increased simplicity in initial coding”

(I understand this completely…but, if we are after “what naturally occurs”, interviews are not necessarily the best avenue to take.  The researcher is guiding this, and it is not natural.  Of course, neither is putting a tape recorder down and picking up on what people are saying.  There is interference either way to some degree. Interviewing seems to be more imposing.)

-          “the goal of traditional interviews is to obtain or measure consistency in participants’ responses; consistency is valued so highly because it is taken as evidence of a corresponding set of actions or beliefs.”

-          Consistency matters in DA, but not in the same way.  Important if researcher wants to think about patterns of language.

-          “Consistency is often less useful and desirable for analysis than variation in interviews.”

-          Idea of tackling the same topic in more than one way (to see if there is variability)

-          Whole interview should be transcribed – the way the interviewer asks the question is important.

Stage five: transcription

-          “A good transcript is essential for a form of analysis which involves repeated readings of sections of data, and the process of transcription itself can be helpful in forcing the transcriber to closely read a body of discourse.”

-          “Transcription is a constructive and conventional activity.  The transcriber is struggling to make clear decisions about what exactly is said, and then to represent those words in a conventional orthographic system (Stubbs, 1983).

-          Have to think carefully about what info is needed from the transcript, and how analysis will go.

-          Total immobility and panic might be part of the process!

-          (I am wondering about how/when you know to use Jeffersonian transcription…after you have read and analyzed enough that you are beginning to see what is important?)

Stage six:  coding

-          Categories related to research questions of interest.

-          “ … as coding has the pragmatic rather than analytic goal of collecting together instances for examination it should be done as inclusively as possible.”

-          “At this stage in the research we are in the business of producing a body of instances, of trying to set limits to that body.”

Stage seven: analysis

-          Riding a bike, not baking a cake!

-          No mechanical process.

-          “… the results of studies of discourse are warranted, and critically examined, in a way that is novel to psychology.”

-          “The skills required are developed as one tries to make sense of transcript and identify the organizational features of documents”

-          Have to read and reread. 

-          “Often it is only after long hours struggling with the data and many false starts that a systematic patterning emerges.”

-          Don’t read for gist, read for specifics – the detail in passages.

-          Phase 1 – search for pattern in the data.  Both in the form of variability (differences in content or form of accounts) and consistency (features shared by accounts).

-          Phase 2 – concern with function and consequence

-          “The basic theoretical thrust of discourse analysis is the argument that people’s talk fulfills many functions and has varying effects”

-          Phase 2 is about forming hypothesis about these functions and searching for linguistic evidence.

-          (This sounds so RR to me.  You go over and over and over how a kid/teacher did something, and you form a tentative theory about what is going on. Not about the general, it is about the particular in the interaction and in the words between teacher and child).

Stage eight: validation

-          Can validate the findings of DA in a number of ways – 4 main ones listed…

1)      Coherence – analysis focuses on how discourse works together and how the structure produces effects and functions.  Exceptions are relevant.  “Cases that lie outside the explanatory framework of a theory are almost always more informative than those that lie within, and often dredge up important problems.”

2)      Participants’ orientation – interested in … “distinctions participants actually make in their interactions and which have important implications for their practice.”  What do participants see as consistent and different – that is what is important.

3)      New problems – looking at “linguistic resources” that make things happen.  Solve problems, but also create problems. “The existence of new problems, and solutions, provides further confirmation that linguistic resources are being used as hypothesized.

4)      Fruitfulness – “an analytic scheme to make sense of new kinds of discourse and to generate novel explanations”

These techniques allow for stringent examination of claims.

Stage nine: the report

-          Want to write in such a way that the reader can critique your interpretations.

-          “Thus a representative set of examples form the area of interest must be included along with a detailed interpretation which links analytic claims to specific parts or aspects of the extracts.”

-          “In this sense discourse analysis could be said to be more rigorous than experimental reports as it is often impossible to independently check the analysis in these cases.”

-          Analytic section will be longer.  Extracts from the transcripts will be included – as well as detailed interpretations.

-          “In discourse analysis the extracts are not characterizations or illustrations of the data, they are examples of the data itself.”

-          Do a rough draft of analysis and discussion early.

-          “Discourse analysis involves fluid movement between the different stages, with coding, analysis, validation and writing each leading back to earlier phases and ultimately to the talk and writing which were the original point of departure.”

Stage ten: application

-          “It is implied that a discipline concerned with language and its function will perhaps be of abstract interest but no practical use.”

-          Atkinson’s CA work on political rhetoric – helps people be more aware and critical.

-          Open up a dialogue

-          “The main point is that application is very much on the agenda and should not be relegated to an optional extra.”

Conclusions

-          No method to discourse analysis in the way we traditionally think of an experimental method

-          Broad theoretical framework – about the nature of discourse and its role in social life, “along with a set of suggestions about how discourse can best be studied and how others can be convinced findings are genuine”

Chapter 9 – Controversial topics and future directions

“Our focus is exclusively on discourse itself: how it is constructed, its functions, and the consequences which arise from different discursive organization.  In this sense, discourse analysis is a radically non-cognitive form of social psychology.”

-          Language of self and mental life is public (through talk) and there for analysis.

-          “Much of the phenomenon of the mind is intersubjectively constituted as the person speaks, writes, reminisces, talks to others and so on.” (internal workings of the mind are a non-issue….because you have public info to analyze).

-          “Understanding is assessed by public criteria and practical tests.”

(This made me think of how we view reading comprehension.  What kids reveal in their writing and in their speaking about a book is their comprehension.)

Future directions

Examination of complex texts (children’s stories – what are the ‘stories’ of struggling readers?

Rhetoric – use of language to persuade (is RR training an act of ‘persuasion” – to get teachers to buy into a way of interacting with kids to teach reading?)

Concerns in the area of ideology

Advantageous that discourse is everywhere! 

Digital Tools Blog -7/25/13

Reading Reflections

PLD – Chapter 6 – Transcribing Audio and Video Data

            “Because it is impossible to document all features of social interaction, all transcripts should be considered partial representations, selective and situated in relationship to the goals of a partial study” p. 5

            I think this is really important to keep in mind, that even with video and audio, what you are capturing is just part of the puzzle.  How you position the camera, where you put the microphones, where you place yourself as the researcher are all impacting what is collected via the digital device.  

Reflective Practice 6.1 – Consider the study you are designing in conjunction with this book

	RR TL Professional Development	RR Student/Teacher Interactions
What kind of audio or video data might you collect and transcribe?	This would be very complex to capture, as there is the student/teacher interactions happening behind the glass and the teacher leader discussion happening in connection to the student/teacher interaction. As I read about Transana, and the layering it affords, I was wondering if this might be appropriate.  Just getting the audio wouldn’t do the experience justice.  I’d want to capture the video as well. If I am doing a case study, I want info about the activities that take place within the training experience and to get to teacher leaders’ perceptions of the experience.  If I am looking at identity, and how the teacher leaders evolve and change over time, then I would want to capture more of the naturally occurring talk, not just during teaching sessions, but also the conversations they have with one another.	This would be more straight forward to collect, even if I used video.  There is just the interaction between the teacher and child, and they are usually in a room by themselves with little background noise or distraction. Again, I would want to capture more than just the audio, as kids expressions and movements are often very telling. I have been thinking about the coaching interactions that happen between a RR teacher and a RR teacher leader.  This might be something interesting to explore.  These conversations generally take place right after a RR lesson has taken place.  This is “individual professional development” that happens through conversation.  This might be a way to get to professional development …a very different kind of professional development.
What information in the recording do you need to attend to?	Language would be important in both (all) cases.  What is said, how it is said, and the actions that result from the talk would be important to capture.   Often, kids just “act” as a result of teacher prompting and talk – this would need to be captured via video, as there is often no talk from the child, just action.
What features such as rate of speech, pitch, and/or overlapping speech will be important?  How might you capture such features in your transcript?	This would be important and difficult to capture … in the teacher discussion BTG, there is so much going on…the kid and teacher audio is heard and the teachers are just talking about what they see, notice or wonder about.  The teacher leader is bringing issues or questions up and the teachers respond.  Even the most polite group of teachers talk over one another and interrupt one another.  The conversation sometimes jumps quickly from reaction to reaction before it settles on a particular line of thought.   Again, I don’t think just audio or transcripts could capture the complexity.  Video would be much more appropriate.  I am thinking of the snippets in the text about the brainstorming sessions of the film makers comes to mind.	I think video would be best if looking at kid/teacher or teacher/teacher leader interactions, but those interactions could be transcribed.  I am thinking verbatim transcription with some sections transcribed with Jeffersonian – depending upon which aspects of the interactions I plan to investigate.  If I was using Jeffersonian, I could attend to things like rate of speed, pitch and overlapping speech and use the conventions of Jeffersonian transcription to capture those aspects.
How might you represent laughter, pauses, gestures?	I would have to capture as much of this as possible.  Pauses would be captured via Jeffersonian transcription.  There is SO much laughter and gesturing in the behind the glass discussions.  The idea of just coding from the video without a transcript might work here.

Johnson – The Speed and Accuracy of Voice Recognition Software Assisted Transcription versus the Listen and Type Method: A Research Note

            I was surprised here when the voice recognition software didn’t give an advantage in terms of time.  I did wonder if the results were influenced by the fact that the researcher had the benefit of having already heard the information, spoken the information, and typed the information through the voice recognition before he tried the listen and type method.  He was familiar and could anticipate the information and perhaps that made him somewhat quicker. What if the listen and type had been the first method attempted and then the voice recognition? 

            The advantages in terms of the behavior of typing was interesting to think about. I have done transcriptions before and my wrists really got a work out.  It might be worth it just in terms of that aspect.  Also, speaking the information is another mode of input (hearing, speaking/hearing and “seeing”/reading as it appears on the screen) that is not present when you transcribe using listen and type.  How does that additional input impact how the researcher understands the information?  I would like to try out Dragon dictate.

Markle, West, and Rich – Beyond Transcription: Technology, Change and Refinement of Method

            I liked this quote on page 3 – “The actual process of making detailed transcripts enables you to become familiar with what you are observing.  You have to listen/watch the recording again and again … Through this process you begin to notice the interesting and often subtle ways people interact.  These are the taken-for-granted features of people’s talk and interaction that without recordings you would routinely fail to notice, fail to remember, or be unable to record in sufficient detail by taking hand-written notes as it happened.” – Rapley 2007, p. 50 – original

            Working with transcripts really does allow you to become close to the information.  And there are aspects and layers that you cannot notice unless you watch/listen over and over.  Through repeated exposure and experience, there are some aspects that no longer get your attention and you are able to devote attention to aspects that were more subtle.  I have experienced this with viewing teaching videos, trying to get at what was going on for a kid, or how my teaching wasn’t meeting the child’s needs.  I am making the leap to the research setting, but I am imagining the process is very similar.   There is a quote further down and it discusses the ability to “virtually re-visit” the site as often as necessary…and I see that as being a really important aspect of researching.  When you have so much data – daily 30 minute lessons…how possible is it to view over and over and over?  I would need to be very clear about  the scope of my study.

            I thought it was interesting to think about how researchers have interviewed in particular ways in order to make transcribing easier.  That seems rather odd to me – and limiting of the information gathered.

            Oh, it was this article that talked about the brainstorming session that was difficult to capture – even using the CA conventions.  I think this is very much like what the RRTL conversations would be like.  “…the transcript loses much of the meaning, emotion, and humor of the episode as the students laugh and respond ..”

Class Reflections

            I have never Skyped before, so this was a good experience – an especially good one to have in a class on digital tools.   Affordances – it allowed me to be here in Atlanta for my meetings and not miss class. I could talk with my classmates in small group, hear the presentations, and practice the tools that were discussed.  I was also able to ask some questions of Rachel and Ann when I ran into trouble.  Additionally, I was able to practice Skype.  This was great, as I think it will be an important tool for me in the upcoming years.  I will be doing a lot of travelling and will need to collaborate with co-workers who are in various locations.  This experience allowed me to feel comfortable with the tool.  Constraints – I had a hard time seeing the presentation screen, as there was a glare.  Luckily, the Power Point will be posted, so I can get those eventually.   It was difficult to hear other people’s responses to questions, or comments when the small groups were sharing out.   There were also times when the video and audio were out of sync.   Overall, I think the affordances far outweigh the constraints.