reflections, day 4

Oops, forgot to blog on Thursday or Friday last week since I was working against the clock to finish reading a dissertation for a defense this week and finish 2 AERA proposals. 

Class seemed to go much more smoothly on Wednesday. We started with Ricardo's webinar on ATLAS.ti which was great, though he was willing to talk for more than an hour, so next time I need to keep that in mind. He also offers a discount on the cost of the software, something else to keep in mind. I encouraged students to consider bringing him to campus if several departments could chip in on the cost. 

We then talked about DiscoverText ideas for studies and preparing for the workshop on ATLAS.ti this week. 

The Inqscribe demo went pretty well. I had students each transcribe the first few turns and email them to me, so that I could pull them up on the screen and show the differences in how each of us "hear" and transcribe the text. I emphasized the strength of synchronizing the text with the audio and the importance of re-listening to the data in addition to re-reading the transcript. We then looked at a transcript that was transcribed using Jeffersonian and discussed the purpose of that annotation system.

The follow up discussion was a good one; with lots of thoughts and talk around all the decisions that need to be made around transcribing. We also talked about the tradeoffs between face to face interviewing and IM interviewing, and what is gained and lost while experiencing the actual conversational event, listening to the recording of the event, and reading a transcription.

We had a bit of time at the end of class to go back and talk about the Internet as data. I showed what is lost when an online forum is downloaded and input into ATLAS.ti (all graphics are lost), and we talked about a couple of ethical dilemmas I am facing in my own research right now in terms of publicly available data that the IRB considers available for research but that the authors of that content may not. Some students had really strong opinions about this which were discussed even further in the blog entries after class. I think the realities of how the Internet is changing research practice definitely hit home.

I also was glad of the chance to talk a bit more about how face to face interaction is still seen as the "gold standard", not only for research data but for other things like teaching learning. People are still skeptical of distance education because it isn't face to face, but my experience has been that I've had DE classes that are much better than f2f classes. The issue isn't merely the medium - online or f2f - it's much more complex than that. I want to encourage people to think in terms of affordances and constraints, not all or nothing/right or wrong ways of doing business - be it the business of research or the business of teaching. 

Overall it felt like a really good class session. Here's hoping for the same tonight!