day 8

We met in Centra on Wednesday night and it was SO much better than the past Centra classes I have facilitated. The video switching feature is awesome, and everything just seems to be much smoother now than it was. Having several guest presenters helped break up the night, and the number of technical difficulties was lower than in past classes. Overall it was really good - though I am always exhausted and my head hurts after Centra classes.

The topics we covered could easily have filled 2-3 class sessions. I wish we could have watched Singapore Dreaming and compared it with one of Woo's academic articles using the same data. I wish we'd had time to really debate arts-based research. I wish we could have all practiced doing word cloud or worked together in ManyEyes.

I'd like to add a reading/discussion around hard and soft process technologies, too. 

Here's an article I ran across that I'd like to use next time.

This page on the different ways to use TagCrowd is useful too.

I would also use some of these special issue articles on performative social science. 

I'm wondering whether I can teach this class again in spring 12 or not...would I have enough students? Would it be good to test out some of the book chapters on the class? Hmm.

 

day 7

We spent the 7th class period on Transana, and I was pleasantly surprised at how open students were to it. I am least comfortable with Transana of all the programs, and I find following the tutorial to be painful, but I think it went okay with just a few technical glitches. This time around I feel like Transana makes more sense to me, especially since I have started using it for two projects recently. 


Tonight we meet in Centra as an example of a collaborative tool. We are going to try to cover way too many tools, but we had to combine two classes into one. I would like to next teach this course over 15 weeks. I would add a night for talking about historical discourses around technology and qualitative research, a night about ethical concerns/trustworthiness issues, and separate out the collaborative tools from the representation of the findings.


I'm not so happy with some of the readings on these topics, but I have found a few more since this syllabus "went to press" that I will probably substitute next time.

The last time I did a virtual classroom was in the spring using Elluminate, so I'm having to relearn the Centra functions. I'm having several students help out with parts of the presenting, so that should make it a little less boring for everyone to sit through 4.5 hours of Centra.

Monday will be the last day - students will engage in focus group-type discussions of lessons learned about the tools. I also clarified the methods section assignment and hope that no one has a breakdown over that assignment. With new courses it's hard to have all the pieces in place before the class starts, so I can imagine it may be causing some stress.