Research question: ‘In what ways is the Covid-19 pandemic changing understandings of the relationships between learning and fun?’ A limited case study of a research group in a UK university. We expect our findings to have implications beyond that group. Data collection using epistolary interviews (via email – one question per email, enabling thoughtful responses […]
I’m just reading through the epistolary interviews which I carried out last year. This technical problem still makes me laugh 😀 “I am unfortunately unable to use the letter next to q and e on the computer(keyboard problems!) (that means the letter after ‘v’ in the alphabet is going to be typed as *!! if […]
When I was studying English, or history, I could curl up in bed with a textbook and feel relaxed and cheerful. It’s never been like that in IET. Apart from the odd easy read – like Howard Rheingold on virtual communities – it all feels like work. Interesting, but work. I’ve just read Walter Ong’s […]
I have knocked my 21 interviews into more-or-less usable form. I now have about 27,000 words of interview response data which is a fair amount to work my way through. To give me some initial pointers, I have made it all into tag clouds using the very user-friendly site tagcrowd.com The picture below shows a […]
Nothing’s ever straightforward, is it? I realised that I asked different questions of the tutors and the students, so ‘question 1’ won’t mean the same thing in every place. So now I have question 1 (the tutor’s question) and question 1s. I have an interview which intersperses my questions with the answers, so Ive added […]
So, I had my eyes tested and realised why I’ve not been getting on with my literature review – I can’t see to read the literature! New glasses on order, so I’m making a start on preparing my data for analysis. You’d think epistolary interviews would be straightforward to input, but there are decisions to […]
I’ve finally taken the plunge and got all my epistolary interviews with students and tutors underway. This was supposed to happen much earlier, but I got held up by the issue of which conferences could be archived which has really only just been sorted out. I didn’t want to end up interviewing a random selection […]
I was just sending the first part of my email interviews out to students, when I thought I should check the link to my web page. I’d forgotten that I’d tried out my Flickr badge there. It works very effectively but lots of my Flickr pix were taken at the Guinness factory when I went […]
I’ve finished one entire interview! Epistolary interviews do take a long time – this one took three and a half weeks, but there’s lots of very good and thoughtful data coming in, so I’m happy about that. Must sort out my data collection in a bit more detail, though. I have several groups in which […]