Erkan's Field Diary

This link was sent to me by Dr. Nespor. It is a comprehensive list of digital tools used by a (now) professor as he was writing his dissertation.

Erkan's Field Diary

Welcome Fall 2009 Students!

Welcome to Digital Tools for Qualitative Research! I look forward to having you in this class and having a chance to share some helpful tools as well as learning from you in the process. Please feel free to browse this site before class begins as it has evolved over the three quarters that I have been teaching it. If you click the label "session" on the right hand side of the screen, you will see all five sessions for this course. Please let me know if you already have experience in any of these areas and we can work out an alternative assignment in something more pertinent to your work. We are all tight on time and my ultimate goal is for this class to be useful to you. Here's to a great quarter!

We will take this survey on the first day of class:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=uCYW_2bOZ84ruDN7yNhe9UEw_3d_3d

polleverywhere

A coworker at ODE sent me a link to this tool www.polleverywhere.com. It works like free clickers for the classroom. Students can text or use twitter to respond to questions as their answers appear on a projector screen before them. As far as qualitative research, or qualitative researchers, are concerned, I could see some potential for interesting conference presentations or data collection in a classroom or a small group interview, but as I know qualitative researchers are endlessly creative, I am sure they will be able to think of other uses for this tool.

One caveat is that the tool is only free for 30 users, and you must pay for anything beyond that.

Web 2.0 for scholars

Recently, I was reading the May 2009 edition of Educational Researcher and I came across a mention of citeulike. This is an online community where researchers can post article references that they like, rank them, and tag them, so that others can search by tag and rating and find some good articles. It's not too populated at the moment, or at least as populated as I thought it would be, but I like the idea. Especially since I'm pretty new at this and I like to know that an article is valued by the community before I spend a lot of time trying to understand and incorporate it into my work.

Prezi

I came across an alternative to PowerPoint that I wanted to share here. It's called prezi and it has an interesting non-linear format so that you may create presentations that begin with a large idea and move through components of that idea in various ways. I've tried it out just a bit, but I really like it. Click on this link to see tutorials on how to use prezi and some examples (at the bottom) of what the presentations look like.

Blogs for teaching and learning

I have the quarter off from teaching this course, so things have been a little slow. However, I am in a class right now (EPL 823) on issues in technology and education. This week, we are to present a Web 2.0 technology and discuss it's issues to teaching and learning. I chose blogging, in particular blogger, since that's what I'm using for this blog. And I chose to post it here because I think it has some relevance to this course.

1) First, a definition: Blog is short for weblog and is essentially an online journal. There are many free, formulaic blog applications (blogger, wordpress, livejournal, etc.) that make blogging today simple for anyone who wants to put content on the web in this form (no HTML experience needed). The tools are simple... sign up, fill in your profile information, click "new post" and start entering text, links, photos, videos, etc. If you want to get fancy, all of the blog applications have various widgets that can be added to your site (like a blogroll, tag cloud, news feed, etc.).

2) Issues related to using blogs in teaching and learning?
Good "issues"-
For the most part, blogs can allow students to display work for a large interactive audience. Blogs can have multiple authors, so it could be used as a collaborative space among students on a project or to discuss their understanding of some concept over time. The public nature drives motivation because the content is no longer limited to a teacher and because they also have the opportunity to get feedback from others interested in their content. Blogging also has the potential to allow students and teachers to reflect on learning, identity, society, etc. and participate in a community of practice. This could lend itself to transferring formal learning to more authentic informal learning or vice versa (if a student had a blog at home to begin with). Teachers could also use blogs as a class website, pointing students to resources, summarizing lectures, sending out timely reminders about homework, creating dialogue with students about the content or the management of the class, etc.
Bad issues-
The main negative within teaching and learning for blogs is the very issue that is a positive, the public nature. Blogs can elicit feedback, but it can also elicit unwanted contact or attention. For young students this is dangerous (though I am skeptical about the odds of this happening) and for teachers it could be career damaging depending on how reflective/honest a teacher is about their practice or feedback to other students. This moves "teacher talk" from the lounge and private comments written in red ink on paper to a persistent, searchable and copyable (to use danah boyd's terms) world. The same could be said for students, who are still forming their identity, and may regret their words years later.

3) As it relates to qualitative research-
Since this blog is on a qualitative research, a method where much learning takes place, I thing blogs are also a useful tool in this arena. A blog could be a space to document field notes, maintain a reflective journal, or dialogue with participants about issues related to research. Depending on the nature of the project, a blog could be kept private or it could be used as a means of member checking or as a way to have others in your field offer up opinions as the work occurs. Since blogs are intended to be used regularly, this could be a motivation to stay on top of data analysis and reflection as it happens rather than putting it off only to try weeks or months later to recall what exactly your thoughts were that day.

Another Word Cloud Creator

I found another tag/word cloud creator. This one is called wordle.net and I like it because each time the cloud has a different look. Here are two that I got after hitting "randomize" (using the same interview).

Plus a benefit of this one is that you can just copy and paste text, so you don't need to save your word doc as .txt.

Another Tag Cloud

I wanted to try another tag cloud with my own real data to see what happened, so here it is. Very interesting indeed.

able (7) ah (23) anything (6) anyways (7) attention (5) based (5) basically (6) beginning (5) book (5) city (9) class (15) classroom (13) computer (13) control (5) couple (9) course (5) critical (4) critique (7) days (5) demo (13) design (16) develop (5) different (8) download (5) enough (4) everything (5) forget (7) free (7) games (45) getting (7) give (7) going (22) gotta (5) grad (4) hear (5) helps (4) historical (7) history (23) interested (11) issue (6) kids (26) laughs (9) learning (18) lesson (4) link (6) lot (10) major (6) making (4) mind (4) model (5) name (5) oh (7) okay (8) paper (5) parents (5) particular (6) past (6) paying (5) people (16) period (4) playing (14) point (5) political (4) project (4) read (9) real (6) really (21) research (5) resources (6) roman (6) rome (8) saying (5) school (21) simulation (25) someone (5) something (11) sort (25) sources (9) start (6) students (10) study (4) sure (7) systems (5) table (5) talking (7) taught (5) teach (9) teacher (5) things (33) think (37) total (8) uh (42) um (69) usually (4) video (10) war (8) ways (4) working (10) yeah (28) years (5)

created at TagCrowd.com

Tag Clouds

In my new qualitative research class tonight, the topic of tag clouds (for some nice examples, see this wikipedia article) came up as a means of visualizing qualitative research data. I hadn't thought about using them in this way, but I can most definitely see their usefulness. I searched google and found a program free online called TagCrowd that is easy to use and generates nice-looking tag clouds. You can either import a plain text document (of say an interview or observation) or you can point it to a website (like a blog or a wiki) and it then takes the most frequently used words (ignoring common words like "the" and "of") and makes a tag cloud showing the which words were used more frequently by corresponding text size. It also give you the html code of the cloud so that you can add your tag cloud to your web site (which I have done below on a practice interview about learning to read) or you could just take a screenshot and add it to a word doc or leave it as is to save locally. There are a few other features such as being able to rearrange the words in the cloud which seem handy as well. This may be a good way to get over the hump and start finding codes.

able actual ah anything bible books chair children church dad describe else er experience front golden help home house laughs learning living looking lot memories mom music okay pause piano pictures play preschool process read really remember room specific stories sure teacher think uh um understanding used voice whatever yeah

created at TagCrowd.com

Thinkful and Uses for Digital Data in Research

I have come across a new resource called Thinkful. I found out about it through the AERA listserv. Here's the email I received explaining what it is:

Hello fellow grad students,
My name is June Ahn and I am a PhD student at the University of Southern California. I've been working on a personal project called thinkful.info (www.thinkful.info) to help me find new articles and books on my research interests. The website takes your keywords, and once a week searches hundreds of top academic journals and Amazon. You get a weekly email of the latest research and books that might be relevant to your areas of interest.... hopefully it will be a simple way to keep abreast of the latest work that is being published, which I find to be one challenge of academia.

I thought that this seemed relevant to our digital tools class, so I wanted to post it here. In addition, as I was reading an article for my social foundations course this week, I was directed to this website: http://www.talkinglongterm.co.uk/database/index.php
It, too, seemed relevant to this course as it shows how digital data can be used as part of a research project (in this case narrative accounts of people's experiences with health care). This is an excerpt from the site:

"The need to place first hand accounts of peoples’ experiences of health and social care at the centre of practice development, research, education and training agendas is widely acknowledged. Narrative interviews attempt to create a space where people can tell their stories as they wish with a minimum of direction. New digital multi-media technologies now provide a powerful way to capture both audio and visual histories, and permits users to search through material relevant to their own interests easily and quickly."

Maybe this is an area where digital data will be relevant (rather than in hypertext dissertations). Thoughts?

Online Surveys

If you are conducting interviews or survey in your qualitative research, you may want to consider using the many (and free) survey tools available. I am familiar with surveymonkey, which is simple to use and includes analytic tools, but if you have the free version, you are limited to ten questions. If you search google for "free online surveys" there are many more to explore! Please let me know if you have found any that are useful in qualitative research.

Hypertext Dissertations

In response to Mitsu's post about needing to see some dissertations that use hypertext. I searched the web and found some examples you all might be interested in exploring. Angel also did her Master's project in this manner, so you may be able to ask her to share her insights.

http://www.sympoiesis.net/?q=onlinediss#
(these are from the 90s, some links are broken, but provide are basic examples)

http://www.nutball.com/dissertation/mains/Narra1.html
(individual research)

Welcome Winter 09 Students... Take two!

I am so glad to have you all in class for the second half of the quarter. Please look over the website at your leisure and let me know if there is anything that looks particularly appealing to you or that perhaps you know well enough to skip. My goal for this class is that it be helpful and pertinent to you and your research. In addition, please take this short survey...

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Sw6Z5CiQdars1l14y_2fY2ww_3d_3d

Concept Map Tools

In class today, I mentioned some concept map tools that I think may be helpful to qualitative research. I have tried Vue, which is from Tufts University and pretty simple to use (and free). Amy had a link to mindmeister on her blog, which I have not used, but which looks interesting because it is web-based (so, no downloading) and can be shared with other users. Also, Lucy asked about using NetDraw, which I have not looked into yet, but it is also a concept mapping tool for mapping and counting nodes and such in a social networking environment. I think I may be adding these as part of the class in the future.

Switch

In case you were having trouble converting audio files, I have been informed (Thanks, Mike!) that there is a free and fast converter available for download for both Windows and Mac. It's called Switch and is made by the same company that makes Express Scribe, which we will be using to transcribe our audio next week. Enjoy the rare day of canceled classes!

Posting Documents to Blogger

In response to Amy's questions of how to post a document as a .jpg and how to link to a google doc, I did a little research and I think I found a way to do both.

First, if you want to post a word document as an image in blogger, you can use Zamzar, but rather than converting the word doc to .jpg (because Zamzar does not give this option), just convert it to .png. Then, the .png file can be uploaded as an image just the same as a .jpg (see below). If you really want a .jpeg, this website says that you can open the .png in paint and then save it as a .jpeg. Also note that the document was three pages and so saved as three separate .png files (I only posted the first page). If you click on this image, it becomes larger and readable. In google docs, there is an option under "Share" that allows you to publish you doc as a webpage. This makes it available for anyone to view (without logging in!). Then, in order to link your image to a google doc, you can click on the actual image and make it a hyperlink (I did not do this above, but tried it below) or you can just make a link to the document in the usual way. Here is my link. Good question! I hope this helps. Let me know if anyone has found a better way or has any suggestions.

Some Quantitative Data...

I took a look at the survey and it looks like we have 1 mac user, 11 PC users and 5 that are ambidextrous. I have a mac, so I always try to give mac options, but this does give me some insight into how to slant the class. Poor mac.

I also wanted to address some questions that came up on the surveys.

1) Will we be using NVivo or NUDIST (yes, that's what it's really called) software?
This course used to be solely about using Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS). Programs in this category are things like NUDIST, NVivo, Qualrus, HyperRESEARCH, ATLAS.ti, etc. When I began to work on revamping the course, Dr. Voithofer and Dr. Nespor both wanted a more comprehensive approach to the digital tools now available (and that mostly free) to assist in qualitative research. As a result, we will not be focused on CAQDAS, though session 5 is dedicated to its use. We use a free program called WeftQDA (see session 5 for more info) that is very basic, but a good starting point for using the other commercial software listed above.

2) Will we cover software such as UCINET, NetDraw, VisuaLyzer or EgoNet?
Unfortunately, this is the first that I have heard of these tools. They are programs developed to visualize social networking. They seem a little more quantitative to me, but I would need to investigate them further before deciding to put them into the class. For those interested in social networks, many of these have a free download. If you you would like to investigate them and show the class the basics of their use (say for ten minutes one day), I would not be opposed to you skipping one of the other assignments that you may feel is not relevant for you. Please email me if you would like to do this.

3) Is there are write and cite function for mac?
There are many tools or bibliographic managers that work for both macs and PCs and we will be looking at these next week. I am most familiar with Zotero (see session 2 for more information) and know that it does have this function, which is very useful.

*And last but not least, if you are planning to bring your laptop to class, it might be helpful for you too look at the coming week and download the software that we will use before coming to class. The wireless in that room can be testy and slow, so just a heads up. Have a nice week!