Category Archives: Research tools

Flickr badge

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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 to the CAL conference at Dublin.

Thought I’d better not give the impression that I’m obsessed with alcohol on my home page. I’d use the badge in this blog, but I can’t work out how to do that. Something to do with the template, I guess. I’ve pasted it below for when I have the time to sort it out.

www.http://www.flickr.com”>www. style=”color:#3993ff”>flickr.com 

This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from ebbsgrovehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/24707984@N00″>ebbsgrove>. Make your own badge here.http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne”>here.>

     

How to archive FirstClass conferences

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  1. Open the relevant FirstClass conference. Right-clicking on the column names in grey allows you to choose which columns will be displayed. Choose Attachments, Name, Last Modified, Kind, Subject. (Kind is just in there to aid the sorting process). Sort by Name by left-clicking on the grey Name column heading. Drag the columns into order. 

  2. In the main Snag-It window, set up a profile with the settings Input=Auto scroll window, Output=File, Effects = Space Formatted. (To do this, change the profile settings at the bottom of the screen, then press the big plus sign near the top right of the screen.) 

  3. Click Capture, and Snag-It will scroll down and pickup the entire window. This takes a couple of minutes. Then save it as a text file. 

  4. Copy all and paste into a Word document. Find and replace the double line spaces and the thousands of double spaces. 

  5. Now set it up to be converted to a table using commas to separate the columns. First, remove all the commas which are already there. Find and replace them with an obvious string such as %%%. 

  6. Take each author’s name. Find and replace the name with a comma after it. Use their full name rather than just their first name, otherwise you’ll run into problems when a name has been included in a subject line. 

  7. Convert the year of posting to the year followed by a comma. Replace the word in the Kind column with a comma, thus putting a division after all the times. 

  8. Go to the Table tab, and convert text to table, choosing the comma to sort the columns. 

  9. Replace the commas which were in the text originally, by replacing all the %%% with commas. 

  10. Paste into Excel, sort by the title column. Replace the numbered Re’s eg Re(2) becomes 2. Replace the remaining Re’s with 1 and put 0 by all other entries.  Delete bracketed numbers (1) and then Re: 
  11. Add a column and manually note which postings have attachments.
  12. Now for the laborious bit. Put it all back into Word ,on a landschape page in a small font. Add two columns and manually paste in all entries and the posting history.

Hoorah for Snag-It!

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Gill has just pointed out to me a brilliant feature of Snag-It. It will pick up text which could not normally be cut and pasted. So the menus on a FirstClass conference, which appear as text, but which I was having to copy across manually, can be picked up in a text capture grab of a scrolling window.

The conference I’m archiving at the moment has around 650 postings. I was having to copy all the authors across, which wasn’t too tricky, but then having to move dates, times and titles manually, which was time consuming, laborious and boring. Now it’s all done with a screen grab and a series of find and replaces. Far quicker.

Hoorah for Snag-It! Everyone should have a copy.

Data collection

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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 all the students have agreed to be archived, and a few where all the students and one tutor have agreed, but only one group where everyone has signed up. I’m going to chase seven groups and hope I get a few extra responses.

I also need to decide exactly who I’m going to interview and how and start getting in touch with absolutely everyone. Oh, and I need to contact the course manager to sort out more about archiving.

Planning my article

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My computer is full of tools for planning the structure of my academic article. I’ve tried it in different Word modes. I’ve tried it on Powerpoint slides. I’ve (halfheartedly) used some concept mapping software. So why is the current plan currently scribbled on the back of a large envelope?

Emotional analysis

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Just been reading Guy Claxton, and that reminded me of the importance of emotion in education. Could I do an emotional analysis of the conference? Is it emotion that moves the students on, or does emotion get in the way of doing anything?

I think, when a student gets upset about the deadlines, that stimulates the rest of the group to move things on. However, it’s not a very emotional group – or they don’t express much emotion anyway, so perhaps this wouldn’t be useful.

According to my word-by-word breakdown (knew it would come in handy sometime)  positive emotions include happiness, sympathy, confidence, enjoyment and negative motions include anxiety, paranoia, frustration, fear, distress, exhaustion, dread, confusion, vulnerability and stress. Seems to be a clear bias towards the negative emotions here, especially as the happiness tends to be because they all wished each other happy Christmas!