day 1 reflections

I'm going to try to keep track of insights related to the course content that might be useful for the book and/or next time I teach this class.

The first night I was surprised to find that several students had not taken Intro to Qual. I'd like to remember to follow up on their experiences to see whether we need to keep Intro as a pre-requisite for the course. I feel less pressure to spend time on foundational topics when I know that everyone has already had the previous course; now, I'm not sure how much I can assume in terms of prior knowledge and experience. 

The students brainstormed a list of what they are looking forward to and what they are concerned about. Going paperless is a big goal, not something I expected (but should have.) I need to follow up with Naomi Baron to find out if her research on print vs. on screen reading has been published. I was happy to hear students questioning the place of technology in the process (this is not a class full of early adopters - hooray!) and they are interested in issues around efficiency vs. effectiveness, affordances vs. constraints. There's concerned that the layers of technology "remove" you from the primacy of the experience (something Jessica and I have talked about), but also good questions about how technology mediates the relationship b/w the researcher/participants and over dependence on the tools to the extent that you don't know how to do anything without the tools (that pretty much describes modern life, I think, and yeah, it's scary). I see a need to maybe add a reading or two that historically contextualizes the debate within the qual field related to the use of technology, maybe a reading on the diffusion of innovations theory, too, and an overview of cloud computing for those unfamiliar with it (cloud computing is what enables most of the new technologies to be so collaborative). 


Another concern is managing the explosion of information and how to focus a literature review. I mentioned the idea of delimiting your search approach which was a new idea for most folks, as well as searching the past 5 years of the major journals in your field. 


Also of concern is the ethics of putting participant information in digital form. Not sure how to tackle this one as no one really knows the answer to this yet.


Journaling seems to be something everyone knows they should do, but no one does well. I'm excited that Ginny shared Evernote, as it may be a better alternative to blogging (well, different, maybe not better, depends on whether you want feedback on your journal or not.) Handhelds/smart phone apps may make it easier to keep up with journaling and even with field notes. We had an interesting discussion about spoken journaling vs. written journaling - both are processing, yet they are different. I wonder if anyone's looked at this research-wise.

There's still a lot of mystery around what the analytic software actually *does*. I fear some students are going to be disappointed when they finally "get it" - but maybe not.  


I want to see whether Brown has published anything recently since his overall argument is similar to the book idea. His concepts of digital convergence and layering are important. 


Finally, the issue of power has come up in both classes. Why is print still the gold standard, even as multimedia develops in leaps and bounds? A lot of what Doug argues is relevant to this class.